Nuevo Dragon City is a reenactment of a historical event from 1927 in which six Chinese were either trapped or voluntarily hid themselves inside a building in northern Mexico. Working with this unsettled mystery, De La Torre’s video inquires into the historical and continuing tensions between Chinese and Mexicans. As such, Nuevo Dragon City depicts a symbolic act of self-entrapment in which six untrained actors of Chinese descent silently blockade themselves inside in an empty Tijuana storefront. As they close off the outside world, their surroundings and actions become a powerful commentary on the social reality of immigrants.
Sergio De La Torre has worked with and documented the manifold ways in which citizens reinvent themselves in the city they inhabit, as well as the site-specific strategies they deploy to move “in and out modernity.” De La Torre often collaborates with his subjects, resulting in both intimate and critical reflections on topics like housing, immigration, and labor. De La Torre approaches these individuals not as victim-subjects, but as people who have attempted to reexamine the meaning of their actions in the context of shifting global conditions.
In 1977, as an already-established artist best known for his films, Bruce Conner began to photograph punk rock shows at Mabuhay Gardens, a San Francisco club and music venue...
Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience...
Priapus Agonistes by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley is the first work in The Minotaur Trilogy (2013-2015), a trio of videos that reimagine the Greek myth of the Minotaur...
Trevor Paglen’s ongoing research focuses on artificial intelligence and machine vision, i.e...
Half Dome Hough Transform by Trevor Paglen merges traditional American landscape photography (sometimes referred as ‘frontier photography’ for sites located in the American West) with artificial intelligence and other technological advances such as computer vision...
A minute Ago starts with a hailstorm pelting down unexpectedly on a quiet beach in Siberia...
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...
Bruce Conner is best known for his experimental films, but throughout his career he also worked with pen, ink, and paper to create drawings ranging from psychedelic patterns to repetitious inkblot compositions...
Burrito Bay is a video by George Kuchar that follows the format of a diary or travelogue centered on a tropical trip to Acapulco, Mexico...
The title Untitled Passport II was first used by Felix Gonzalez-Torres in an unlimited edition of small booklets, each containing sequenced photographs of a soaring bird against an open sky...
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...
Sweet Jesus is a sound installation by Lutz Bacher that consists of a found recording of James Earl Jones’ iconic voice reciting biblical genealogy from Matthew, Book 1...
A photograph of a tin box full of marijuana simply titled Green Box, speaks to the constantly changing status of the substance–once taboo or illicit, now a symbol of a growing industry in Northern California...