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...
In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
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...
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...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
In New York City’s Chinatown, subject Suat Ling Chua’s morning exercise is to practice the hula hoop...
These two images come from the series called “State of Control” which Kilpper made in the building formerly occupied by the Stasi in Berlin...