In her masterpiece 8 Possible Beginnings or The Creation of African-America , Walker unravels just that, the story of struggle, oppression, escape and the complexities of power dynamics in the history following slave trade in America. Her use of contour and silhouette accentuate emotion with rigor, she reduces the narrative to black and white as gruesome acts of sex and violence address trauma, fear and suffering through a majestic play of shadow and light.
Kara E. Walker is a monumental American artist whose work probes the tarnished history of race in America, as well as that of gender, and sexual identity. Walker works in sculpture, collage, mixed media, drawing, graphic imagery and moving image/animation. Her iconic cutout silhouettes sample fragments of folklore as well as recorded history, as she often shows stereotypical depictions of African Americans as portrayed in history books in shockingly graphic yet accurate situations. She elegantly presents a problematic past, seduced by the medium yet wrought by unsettled emotion.
Memorial for intersections #2 (2013) is a minimalist, black metallic structure that contains the brightly colored translucent circles, triangles, rectangles, and squares that originally were presented in Pica’s performance work A ? B ? C (2013)...
Though the title might suggest an Adonis, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Swimmer (2012) is a squat, jolly man with a protuberant belly...
Her 2016 video installation quotes the sitcom-as-form and also draws from a 1907 comedic short, Laughing Gas...
The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization...
Itch explores the relationship between technology and daily human experience with a motorized arm that extends from within the gallery’s wall, moving up and down while holding a projector that shows a desperately scratching pair of hands....
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht...
Los rastreadores is a two-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz narrating the story of a fictitious drug lord, Ernesto Suarez, whose character is based on the well-known Bolivian drug dealer, Roberto Suárez...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
Catherine Opie’s candid photograph Cathy (bed Self-portrait) (1987) shows the artist atop a bed wearing a negligee and a dildo; the latter is attached to a whip that she holds in her teeth...
Choke documents the artist filming a wrestler “choking out” his teammate until he is unconscious...
Although seemingly unadorned at first glance, Yang Xinguang’s sculptural work Phenomena (2009) employs minimalist aesthetics as a means of gesturing towards the various commonalities and conflicts between civilization and the natural world...
Continuing Oursler’s broader exploration of the moving image, Absentia is one of three micro-scale installations that incorporate small objects and tiny video projections within a miniature active proscenium...
In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China...
Sign #1 , Sign #2 , Sign #3 were included in “Found Object Assembly”, Copeland’s 2009 solo show at Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco...
Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters...
The Last Post was inspired by Sikander’s ongoing interest in the colonial history of the sub-continent and the British opium trade with China...