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...
Sign #1 , Sign #2 , Sign #3 were included in “Found Object Assembly”, Copeland’s 2009 solo show at Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco...
Telescopic Pole is an adjustable telescopic pole that extends vertically from floor to ceiling and is held up by its own internal pressure...
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage...
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...
Every work in Hoeber’s 2011 series Execution Changes is titled in alphanumeric code...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Shot in the streets of Tokyo, Collapse , is a meditation on the passing of time and on the complicated way in which we are smashed between the past and the future...
This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series...
Open Mind is a model created by Capote for a traversable public maze that, when seen from above, resembles the human brain...