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 All of this is in direct opposition to an almost outdated value system represented by Lenin’s tomb across the road.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...
In establishing a deliberate distance between viewer and subject, Lassry raises questions about representation itself and how all portraits are, in effect, fully constructed objects that only gain meaning once we ascribe them with our own personal associations and emotions...
In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
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...
The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form...
In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...
For his series of digital collages Excerpt (Sealed)… Rhodes appropriated multiple images from mass media and then sprayed an X on top of their glass and frame...
MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...
McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...