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 2008, Grassie was invited by the Whitechapel Gallery to document the transformation of some of its spaces...
Every work in Hoeber’s 2011 series Execution Changes is titled in alphanumeric code...
In Reyes’s words, “We should be able to extract the technological nutrients before we excrete our waste...
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...
Dorsky’s pieces included in the Kadist Collection are small still photographs from twelve of his most important films...
To explore the boundaries between artwork and audience, Gimhongsok created a series of sculptural performances in which a person wearing an animal costume poses in the gallery...
Towhead n’Ganga, enclosed in darkness, lorded over by the sexualized folded high priestless form reflects many of Kelley’s works, in both its compositional and semantic qualities...
In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
The fashion designer is selling off all the art inside his West Village townhouse at Sotheby’s New York to make way for a new collection....
Though not strictly representational, some objects in Untitled (1962) are recognizable: a flower, an egg, a foot...
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...
The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel...
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...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...