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.
A residency program in the blazing hot city of Honda, Colombia, inspired artist Nicolás Consuegra to consider the difficulty in understanding the needs of a distant community...
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...
Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience...
In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...
While Untitled (Shuffle) presents the same formal characteristics as the rest of Berman’s verifax collages, this constellation of specific images inside the radio’s frames—the Star of David, Hebrew characters, biblical animals—have Jewish symbolism and attest to the artist’s lasting obsession with the kabala...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
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...
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...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
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...
Consuegra’s Colombia is a mirror made in the shape of the artist’s home country—a silhouette that has an important resonance for the artist...
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...
Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock...