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...
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...
The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell...
Gabriel Orozco comments: “In the exhibition [Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002], I tried to connect with the photographs I took in Mali in July...
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...
Charco portátil congelado (Frozen Portable Puddle, 1994) is a photographic record of an installation of the same name that Gabriel Orozco made at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam for the group exhibition WATT (1994)...
Poised with tool in hand, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Carpenter (2012) reaches forward, toward his workbench...
Central Station, Alignment, and Argument are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...
Baby Shoes, Never Worn is part of photographer John Houck’s series of restrained still-life photographs capturing objects from his childhood...
Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall...
John Houck’s multi-layered photographic compositions immortalize nostalgic objects from the artist’s childhood, manipulated in the studio and in post-production into unreal still-life arrangements...
Last Postcards is a series of three small double-sided paintings on plywood in which Biernoff imagines the last communications from explorers lost in the wilderness...
Houck’s Peg and John was made as part of a series of photographic works that capture objects from the artist’s childhood...
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...
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...
In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...
LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel...