Barbara Kasten’s Studio Construct 51 depicts an abstract still life: a greyscale photograph of clear translucent panes assembled into geometric forms, the hard lines of their edges converging and bisecting at various points. Light streams from unseen sources and projects rectangular shadows against an adjacent wall. Three-dimensional shapes become suddenly flat as the objects in Kasten’s still life are juxtaposed alongside their ghostly traces. Kasten’s assemblages could be seen as sculptural plays on geometric abstraction, but her sets are deliberately temporary and staged only to be photographed and subsequently dismantled. In shifting focus from the object-as-subject to the document, Studio Construct 51 privileges ephemerality over permanence and suggests that all physical forms are transient and ultimately only recognizable by the artifacts that they leave behind.
Barbara Kasten creates constructions for the camera by building temporary sets out of unidentified materials that she photographs and immediately disassembles. Producing continuously since the 1960s, Kasten’s work is often identified with the California Light and Space Movement, and her photographs deliberately play on perceptual phenomena of light and shadow. Kasten is a self-taught photographer and distances herself from the profession. Regardless, her work continues to influence younger generations of photographers who are inspired by her innovative and experimental compositions.
The application of bright colors and kitsch materials in Flower Tree manifests a playful comment on the influence of popular culture and urban lifestyle...
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...
Every work in Hoeber’s 2011 series Execution Changes is titled in alphanumeric code...
Physical and mental exploration have been founding elements in Joachim Koester’s research for several years...
McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works...
Sign #1 , Sign #2 , Sign #3 were included in “Found Object Assembly”, Copeland’s 2009 solo show at Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco...
Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...
Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters...
Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees...
Destilaciones ( Distillations , 2014) is an installation composed of a group of ceramic pots, presented on the floor and within a steel structure...
Untitled (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...
Justice (2014) presents viewers with a curious assemblage: a wooden gallows with slightly curved spindles protruding from the topmost plank, which in turn is covered with rudimentary netting, the threads slackly dangling like a loose spider’s web or an rib cage that’s been cracked open...
Ammo Bunker (2009) is a multipart installation that includes large-scale wall prints and an architectural model...
Bruce Conner is best known for his experimental films, but throughout his career he also worked with pen, ink, and paper to create drawings ranging from psychedelic patterns to repetitious inkblot compositions...
Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon...
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...