129H x 78W inches
It may take a minute to recognize the background of New Fall Lineup – the colors are tweaked into a world of cartoon and candy, and it is covered by leaping energetic figures and flying squirrels. One realizes, though, that the image is of the World Trade Center exploding into flame, creating a strange contrast with the painting’s colors and the other images. The combination is peculiar because the role the explosion serves here is non-specific. The image loses its totemic weight, as it seems to not matter what particular explosion this is. The picture exists in a strange cultural subconscious of flight, candy, blockbuster movies, and the news, tied together by delicate tight painting.
Conrad Ruiz makes watercolor paintings of fantastic scenes. Bursts of color and energy sit behind flying figures and animals. Images become painted patterns, as rows of repeated objects and buildings’ striations verge on geometric abstraction. Ruiz’ identifies his work with the “ultimate boy zone”, and the connection is clear. His paintings are populated by explosions, giant sharks, and athletes. Ruiz creates his painting carefully, tracing projected images and carefully following lines. The semi-transparency of his watercolor fills gives his otherwise firm images a shimmering quality, contributing to their overall impression of dreamy unreality.
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...
Dorsky’s pieces included in the Kadist Collection are small still photographs from twelve of his most important films...
The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
Gabriel Orozco comments: “In the exhibition [Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002], I tried to connect with the photographs I took in Mali in July...
Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape...
In No Title (Blue Chapel) Therrien has reduced the image of a chapel to a polygon...
Central Station, Alignment, and Argument are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...
Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining....
Untitled #242 is part of Houck’s Aggregates Series, which uses digital tools to manipulate chosen sets and pairs of colors, creating colorful index sheets, bathed in colors and lines...
The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell...
John Houck’s brown- , sienna- and golden-toned composition, Untitled #185, 65, 535 combinations of a 2×2 grid, 16 colors , features densely packed lines of color moving diagonally across the creased page...
Baby Shoes, Never Worn is part of photographer John Houck’s series of restrained still-life photographs capturing objects from his childhood...
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...
The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits...
LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel...
Though the title might suggest an Adonis, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Swimmer (2012) is a squat, jolly man with a protuberant belly...
In her recent work, Biernoff is interested in investigating fictions and fantasies embedded in the remnants of consumer culture (for example magazines) or through ephemera such as postcards and old photographs...
Long Long Live (2013) takes the viewer to the setting of the Oasis Villa on Green Island, once a reform and re-education prison to house political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period...
Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle...