4 panels; 24.5H x 72W inches
To make his series Shadows (1980), Gaines subjected 20 potted plants to a uniform procedure. Each is pictured four times: a photograph of the plant, a photograph of its shadow, a drawing of the plant, and a drawing of its shadow. Instead of lending structure to disparate entities, this system serves a counterintuitive purpose, dissolving the object. Just as meaning can be drained from a word through relentless repetition, Gaines’s thorough application of an invented representational system undermines the thing-ness of the simplest thing. Here, the artist effectively questions a concept as vast as objective truth by presenting an alternate theory of an object as ordinary as a houseplant
Charles Gaines orchestrates opportunities for aesthetic judgments, often turning mundane objects and spaces into newly indeterminate propositions. By adhering to self-defined processes, he explores the structures by which we make meaning, supplanting objective claims with the infinitely interpretable. Gaines is currently based in Los Angeles, where he teaches at California Institute of the Arts. He is influenced by John Cage, and like Cage’s, his work has served as a seminal guidepost for a younger generation of concept-oriented image makers.
Untitled (Women) (2011) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity...
In line with Hernández’s interest in catastrophe, Vulnerabilia (choques) is a collection of images of shipwrecks and Vulnerabilia (naufragios) collects scenes of car crashes...
At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
In 1977, as an already-established artist best known for his films, Bruce Conner began to photograph punk rock shows at Mabuhay Gardens, a San Francisco club and music venue...
Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition...
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...
The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964)...
In his composition, Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk, Lassry’s subjects are mirrored in their surroundings (both figuratively, through the chocolate colored backdrop and the brown frame; and literally, in the milky white, polished surface of the table), as the artist plays with color, shape, and the conventions of representational art both within and outside of the photographic tradition...
The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel...
Nicolas Paris studied architecture and worked as an elementary school teacher before he decided to become an artist...
The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...
Untitled (rolled up) , is an abstract portrait of Owen Monk, the artist’s father and features an aluminum ring of 56.6 cm in diameter measuring 1.77 cm in circumference, the size of his father...
In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...