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.
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...
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....
Kwan Sheung Chi’s work One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills...
Untitled #242 is part of Houck’s Aggregates Series, which uses digital tools to manipulate chosen sets and pairs of colors, creating colorful index sheets, bathed in colors and lines...
In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China...
Uncertain Pilgrimage is an ongoing project in which Moore draws from his unplanned travels in recent years...
Though the title might suggest an Adonis, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Swimmer (2012) is a squat, jolly man with a protuberant belly...
A 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...
Poised with tool in hand, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Carpenter (2012) reaches forward, toward his workbench...
Gabriel Kuri has created a series of works in which he juxtaposes perennial and ephemeral materials...
A Portrait: Covering and Cleaning is an installation of six black-and-white video projections...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage...
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 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
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...