Sign series, #1, #2, #3
2009
Bjorn Copeland
Sign #1 , Sign #2 , Sign #3 were included in “Found Object Assembly”, Copeland’s 2009 solo show at Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco. These rather austere collages were created by simply cutting and inverting the text from existing information signs. In Sign #2 , for example, the original image that presumably carried the message “NO RIDERS” was placed upside down. By cutting out some of the syllables and inverting and rearranging them, the message was rendered unreadable. By maintaining the overall integrity of the signs and their most legible visual characteristics (luminescent color, bold font, size and rectangular format), Copeland’s collages obscure language in favor of a “delirious optical disorientation.”
Bjorn Copeland (along with his brother Eric) is an original member of Black Dice, an experimental/noise band associated with the thriving musical movement around the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the late 1990s. Not surprisingly, Copeland’s visual practice is connected to that music scene, most obviously in his use of psychedelic designs associated with concert flyers which deploy hypnotic, almost acid-driven pop referents in a certain “op” manner. In many of his recent assemblages and collages, Copeland reuses discarded products, accumulated and found debris, as well as product packaging. As with his music, he rearranges and re-composes these preexisting structures, building complicated and intricate abstract patterns that aim to disorient and play with the viewer’s perception.
Colors:
Other related works, blended automatically
© » KADIST
Wong Wai Yin
2021Drawn 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...
© » KADIST
Kwan Sheung Chi
2012Kwan Sheung Chi’s work One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills...
© » KADIST
Chadwick Rantanen
2010Telescopic Pole is an adjustable telescopic pole that extends vertically from floor to ceiling and is held up by its own internal pressure...
© » KADIST
Zai Kuning
2014Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago...
© » KADIST
John Houck
2013Houck’s Peg and John was made as part of a series of photographic works that capture objects from the artist’s childhood...
© » KADIST
Geoffrey Farmer
2009Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger was Farmer’s first kinetic sculpture that added a cinematic character to an “ever-reconfiguring play presented in real time.” The assembly of various objects and props on top of a large platform constitutes not only a work, but, to a certain extent, a show in itself...
© » KADIST
Yang Guangnan
2011Itch 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....
© » KADIST
Minouk Lim
2012The Possibility of the Half by Minouk Lim is a two-channel video projection that begins with a mirror image of a weeping woman kneeling on the ground...
© » KADIST
Bruce Conner
2008Unlike 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...
© » KADIST
Leslie Shows
Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage...
© » KADIST
Shahzia Sikander
2010The Last Post was inspired by Sikander’s ongoing interest in the colonial history of the sub-continent and the British opium trade with China...
© » KADIST
Kwan Sheung Chi
2007A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s cloths drying rack (2007) was realized in the year of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China...
© » KADIST
Wong Wai Yin
2008In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China...
© » KADIST
Edward Kienholz
1984Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...
© » KADIST
Patty Chang
The video “Shangri-La” refers to the mythical city of James Hilton’s novel “Lost Horizon” written in 1933 and is exemplified in a film by Frank Capra which speaks of eternal youth in a city of happiness...