Killed is a video projection in which William E. Jones appropriated and edited, in a rapid sequence, a selection from the more than 68,000 censored or discarded films produced by the Farm Security Administration’s photographers between 1935 and 1943. Roy Emerson Stryker, the then director of the program, was in charge of what he called “killing” negatives by punching holes in them to render them unusable. Killed continues Jones’s use of discarded film footage seen in his video created from vintage 1970s and 1980s gay porn that was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. By recuperating lost and rather unseen pictures by emblematic American photographers such as Walker Evans, Theodor Jung, Carl Mydans, among others, Killed sheds a new light on the way American history has been written and the crucial role images have played in it.
Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker William E. Jones appropriates vintage film material that he rearranges into new compositions. Often concerned with the way gay imagery was depicted in 1970s and 1980s, Jones’s early films explore the complex configuration of homosexual identity with a rather nostalgic and romanticized gaze. Though fashioned in the same way, his later pieces look more directly at pornography and the appearance of fetish in popular culture.
The Striation Scrap Lamps (vertical and horizontal) although functioning as utilitarian objects also represent Jason Meadows’s interest in a certain kind of crafted sculpture...
Donald of Doom Tank (2008) is a replica of a vintage metal toy with Donald Duck’s image one side and a soldier on the other...
Jason Meadows’s Do Not Pass Go (2011) depicts Richie Rich, “the poor little rich boy” of the 1950s comic strip...
One Universe, One God, One Nation was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s analysis of space exploration and by the astrological horoscope of Chinese political and military leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975)...
His series, The Golden State, harkens back to his early career and his photographic training...
The Striation Scrap Lamps (vertical and horizontal) although functioning as utilitarian objects also represent Jason Meadows’s interest in a certain kind of crafted sculpture...
Donald of Doom Tank (2008) is a replica of a vintage metal toy with Donald Duck’s image one side and a soldier on the other...
This work includes sketches for Extrastellar Evaluations , the project she produced at Kadist...
His series, The Golden State, harkens back to his early career and his photographic training...
In the early 20th century, the Hercules Engine Company was doing a brisk business producing customized, heavy-duty engines...
In Restaurant, Canton, Ohio (2011), a convenience store offers food, liquor, and Coca Cola to an empty street...
Foreigners Everywhere is a series of neon signs in several different languages...
dbqp is a photographic series in which the artist handles an enlargement of the plate with three cutout windows which was used for L’Archipel (The Archipelago) in collaboration with Pierre Leguillon...
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
Maya Watanabe’s video installation Bullet unfolds within the context of the Peruvian justice and forensic systems...
On 15 September 1963 members of the Ku Klux Klan blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama up using dynamite...
Masterpiece in the Water by Lu Pingyuan tells the story of an impatient collector who is killed by an artist...