32H x 60W x 12D inches
The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami. From left to right, each bill is progressively folded up, step by step, into the shape of a gun. Both a scream and a whisper are capable of conveying the same content, if at drastically different decibels, the artist proposes. The folded guns suggest that United States currency carries with it an implicit violence. Though ordinarily barely audible, Capistran’s lucid permutations make that violence loud and clear. From a Whisper to a Scream is also the title of a 1987 horror film (also called The Offspring ), in which a historian describes a series of gruesome murders that take place in a small town, the seeming center of an incomprehensibly evil force. In this case, the treacherous power is shown to be ubiquitous—the foundation of an economy that permeates everything and leaves no one untouched.
Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Juan Capistran was undocumented until midway through grade school. As a teenager he gravitated toward graffiti, punk rock, reggae, house music, and DJ culture as tools for crafting a hybrid identity. His work has diverse influences, from Malcolm X to Led Zeppelin and Richard Serra, and it quotes keenly and democratically, from gang colors to minimalist forms.
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...
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...
The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell...
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 Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources...
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...
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...
Part of a larger series of photographic works, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck’s Corrupted file from page 14 (V1) from the series La Vega, Plan Caracas No...
Calderón & Piñeros (La Decanatura) refer to Sólheimasandur as a work that tackles the issue of “the ruin as a tourist destination.” As they say, “at the end, tourists become an essential part of this unusual, beautiful, and—at the same time—banal landscape.” The video features a plane wreck on Sólheimasandur beach in Iceland, where a navy plane belonging to the United States Army crashed in 1973 due to fuel exhaustion...
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...
While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves...
Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources...
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...
Part of a larger series of photographic works, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck’s Corrupted file from page 14 (V1) from the series La Vega, Plan Caracas No...
Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
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 New York City’s Chinatown, subject Suat Ling Chua’s morning exercise is to practice the hula hoop...
And words were whispered by Sancintya Mohini Simpson is a series of ten works on paper based on the lived experiences of Indian women taken to the Natal region of South Africa from the 1860s to the early 1900s to work in tea and sugarcane plantations during apartheid, which included servitude in its broadest and most sinister definition...