In Restaurant, Canton, Ohio (2011), a convenience store offers food, liquor, and Coca Cola to an empty street. A series of boarded-up storefronts marred by peeling paint conveys a sense of the pre- or post-apocalyptic—the hush just before or after a disaster. The reds, pinks, and oranges of the buildings give off warmth, but the absence of human activity makes the glow eerie and strange. Once a booming steel town, Canton is now struggling, and many of its buildings have been neglected for decades. While the location of William E. Jones’s photograph is specific, we can’t help extrapolating to imagine any Main Street, USA, that has been left to atrophy in the wake of big industry gone bust.
Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker William E. Jones appropriates vintage film material that he rearranges into new compositions. Often concerned with the way gay imagery was depicted in 1970s and 1980s, Jones’s early films explore the complex configuration of homosexual identity with a rather nostalgic and romanticized gaze. Though fashioned in the same way, his later pieces look more directly at pornography and the appearance of fetish in popular culture.
His series, The Golden State, harkens back to his early career and his photographic training...
The Striation Scrap Lamps (vertical and horizontal) although functioning as utilitarian objects also represent Jason Meadows’s interest in a certain kind of crafted sculpture...
Donald of Doom Tank (2008) is a replica of a vintage metal toy with Donald Duck’s image one side and a soldier on the other...
Jeep Comics is based on the second of only two issues published by RB Leffingwell and Company in 1944–45...
Jason Meadows’s Do Not Pass Go (2011) depicts Richie Rich, “the poor little rich boy” of the 1950s comic strip...
Collier Schorr’s prints upend conventions of portrait photography by challenging what it means to “document” a subject...
Titled afterTruman Capote’s protagonist famously played by Audrey Hepburn in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Holly Golightly (2011) captures the essence of the character: seductive and bold, mysterious and capricious...
In the Collage II (Marie) (2013), Shorr seems to have an ostensibly clear subject, a female subject identified in the work’s title as “Marie,” a slim but athletic woman with brown hair pictured reclining atop a brilliantly white sheet draped against a marbled tan-and-white backdrop...
This work includes sketches for Extrastellar Evaluations , the project she produced at Kadist...
One Universe, One God, One Nation was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s analysis of space exploration and by the astrological horoscope of Chinese political and military leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975)...
Extrastellar Evaluations is a multimedia installation produced during Yin-Ju Chen’s residency at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2016...
Gutmann’s photographs Untitled Nob Hill and From the North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge are some of the oldest pieces in the Kadist Collection and serve as historical anchors for many of the more recent works...
Through a semi-fictional approach, Extrastellar Evaluations envisions a version of history in which alien inhabitants, the Lemurians, lived among humans under the guise of various renowned conceptual and minimal artists in the 1960s (Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, and James Turrell to name a few)...