Sound of Ice Melting is based on the ancient Zen Buddhist koan about the sound of one hand clapping. Here, Kos has surrounded two twenty-five-pound blocks of ice with eight microphones that call to mind the political press conferences prevalent during the Vietnam War era when this piece was created. Zen practice values such absurdity as a way to transcend the limitations of ordinary discourse and rational thought—empirical processes at the root of all political conflicts.
Paul Kos works with everyday materials and video to enact a playful conceptual engagement with life and the world. He responds to simple, humble materials and the indigenous elements of specific sites, which he mines for their physical properties and metaphoric possibilities. Throughout these pieces, Kos’s work uses humor to relate the stuff of life back to larger questions of time and spirituality.
The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits...
In Reyes’s words, “We should be able to extract the technological nutrients before we excrete our waste...
In the six-minute single-channel video Higher Horse , Kate Gilmore perches herself on top of a tall pile of plaster blocks, in front of a pink colored wall with vein-like streaks of red...
The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations...
“BC/AD” (Before Cancer, After Diagnoses) is a video of photographs of the artist’s face dating from early childhood to the month before he died, accompanied by the last diary entries he wrote from April 2004 to July 2005 (entitled “50 Reasons for Getting Out of Bed”), from the period from when he lost his voice, thinking he had laryngitis, through the moment he was diagnosed with lung cancer and the subsequent treatment that was ultimately, ineffective...
The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations...
Pedro Reyes’s Los Mutantes ( Mutants , 2012) is composed of 170 plates that combine characters from ancient and modern mythologies...
Like many of Larry Bell’s works, VFGY9 deals primarily with the viewer’s experience of sight...
Though not strictly representational, some objects in Untitled (1962) are recognizable: a flower, an egg, a foot...
Comprised of fifty-one photographic postcards, Antin’s 100 Boots is an epic visual narrative in which 100 black rubber boots stand in for a fictional “hero” making a “trip” from California to New York City...
The Nightwatch , which is an ironic reference to the celebrated painting by Rembrandt, follows the course of a fox wandering among the celebrated collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London...
This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...
In 2008, Grassie was invited by the Whitechapel Gallery to document the transformation of some of its spaces...
Behind the simplicity and beauty of this untitled photograph of a brilliantly-colored flowerbed by Félix González-Torres are two remarkable stories of love, loss, and resilience...