Paper Tigers…from a whisper to a scream

2012 - Sculpture (Sculpture)

32H x 60W x 12D inches

Juan Capistran

location: Los Angeles, California
gender: male
nationality: Mexican American
home town: Guadalajara, Mexico

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.


Colors:



Related works featuring themes of: » Americana, » Appropriation Art, » Art in Art, » Caricature / Parody, » Mexican American  
» see more

Long Long Live
© » KADIST

Yao Jui-Chung

2013

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...

Rocket
© » KADIST

Jeffrey Vallance

1978

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...

Last Postcards
© » KADIST

Elisheva Biernoff

2009

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...

Other related works, blended automatically  
» see more

The Breaks
© » KADIST

Juan Capistran

2002

The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources...

Long Long Live
© » KADIST

Yao Jui-Chung

2013

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...

Rocket
© » KADIST

Jeffrey Vallance

1978

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...

Meeting #100
© » KADIST

Jonathan Monk

Meeting #100 is one in a series of text works by Jonathan Monk...

Related works sharing similar palette  
» see more

Kitt Bennett Crafts Record-Breaking ‘Gif-iti’
© » HIGH FRUCTOSE

Kitt Bennett's "aerial mural work" was recently combined with satellite technology to craft the world's most massive independently created piece of "gif-iti" (or GIF-style graffiti) on 96,875-square-feet of waterfront space in Australia...

Harrell Fletcher
© » KADIST

Thursday 19 December 2009 at 7pm, at Bétonsalon...

Capturing Time
© » KADIST

Capturing Time September 13 – November 8, 2009 Kadist Art Foundation is pleased to announce the first exhibition to be drawn from its collection...

Whispers
© » LENS CULTURE

Whispers - Photographs by Yuanbo Chen | Text by Magali Duzant | LensCulture Feature Whispers A multi-layered approach to visual storytelling — a conversation, a portrait, and a detail of a personal object or a place — captures the shared experiences of Chinese citizens coping with isolation while abroad during the Covid lockdown...

Related works from the » 2010's created around » Los Angeles, California  
» see more

Silencer #16 & #17
© » KADIST

Will Rogan

2010

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...

Serengeti Green
© » KADIST

Phillip Maisel

2015

While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves...

Untitled (Men)
© » KADIST

Matt Lipps

2011

In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...

There are veins in these lands, I
© » KADIST

Rodney McMillian

2013

In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...

Other works by: » Juan Capistran  
» see more

The Breaks
© » KADIST

Juan Capistran

2002

The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources...

White Minority
© » KADIST

Juan Capistran

2005

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...

Corrupted file from page 14, (V1)
© » KADIST

Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck

2008

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...

Foreigners Everywhere (Italian)
© » KADIST

Claire Fontaine

2006

Foreigners Everywhere is a series of neon signs in several different languages...

Black Hands, White Cotton
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2014

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...

Related works found in the same semantic group  
» see more

The Levity, The Gravity
© » KADIST

Prior to the mid-1800s, tactile interaction was routine for visitors experiencing collections of art, and touch permeated accounts of aesthetic appreciation...

The Art Market Has Radically Changed. Here's How to Buy Art Today - via CNN
© » LARRY'S LIST

Once a "secret world of whispers," the art market today is much more accessible thanks to massive efforts to move it online...

Willi Brandt, Günther Guillaume and Dietrich Sperling
© » KADIST

Thomas Kilpper

2009

These two images come from the series called “State of Control” which Kilpper made in the building formerly occupied by the Stasi in Berlin...

Winter North Summer South No. 2
© » KADIST

Zhou Tao

2019

Zhou Tao spent almost two years in 2017 and 2018 in an eco-industrial park at the foot of the Kunlun Mountains in China exploring the activities of humans and other species in that particular topography between the mountain, the land and the desert...