The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel. The action is simple: I kick a video camera through a site that is embedded with sociological elements, which I try to question through my practice. I chose Red Square as the site to work in Moscow. The square is interesting as a kind of high/low, new/old dichotomy of a new capitalist regime, with the most expensive World-brands of fashion, design and architecture creeping in like a drug that everyone is forced to take but hasn’t been tested long enough to know the effects. All of this is in direct opposition to an almost outdated value system represented by Lenin’s tomb across the road. After summing up this pyramid of power and history, having it laid out in a square where there can be a final point… me as an American here performing a very minimal, radical action of kicking a camera over time within those parameters. The camera breaks down within three to four minutes, creating a time-based situation: the image that is being recorded disappears kick after kick and visually erases all the embedded history, the politics… the finished work lends itself to a social/cultural amnesia that I find exists in this place.”
Aaron Young’s artworks rely on the aftereffects of dynamic, energetic, and sometimes even dangerous performances. He hires participants stereotyped as marginalized rebels, such as skateboarders and motorcycle riders, to perform various stunts in exhibition spaces on specially prepared platforms—such as the performance Arc Light for the exhibition, for what you are about to receive. Like Steven Parrino, Young uses destructive actions as generative force; the traces of his ephemeral acts are recorded as videos, drawings, sculptures, and photographs to constitute artistic artifacts.
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
The black-and-white photograph Men (055, 065) (2012) depicts two similarly built young men – young and slim, with dark tousled hair and a square jaw line – seated aside one another in identical outfits...
Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...
Shot in the streets of Tokyo, Collapse , is a meditation on the passing of time and on the complicated way in which we are smashed between the past and the future...
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...
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage...
Martinez’s sculpture A meditation on the possibility… of romantic love or where you goin’ with that gun in your hand , Bobby Seale and Huey Newton discuss the relationship between expressionism and social reality in Hitler’s painting depicts the legendary Black Panther leaders Huey P...
In line with Hernández’s interest in catastrophe, Vulnerabilia (choques) is a collection of images of shipwrecks and Vulnerabilia (naufragios) collects scenes of car crashes...
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Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner...
Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor...