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...
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)...
Vallance’s Rocket is a vibrant picture in which masses of color and collage coalesce into a central vehicle, yet the whole surface seems lit with the roar of space travel...
In 1940 Rivera came to San Francisco for what would be his last mural project in the city, Pan-American Unity ...
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...
Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...
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...
Though the title might suggest an Adonis, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Swimmer (2012) is a squat, jolly man with a protuberant belly...
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...
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...
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...
The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell...
Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...
LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel...
In No Title (Blue Chapel) Therrien has reduced the image of a chapel to a polygon...
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...