There are several elements to Subject, Silver, Prism . Silver ink is applied to blocks of black foam. A simple stand, reminiscent of cheap furniture, supports a drum constructed from deer hide stretched over plastic cooking bowls and held taut by the hide and twine. The tightness of the drum and the stiffness of its table offset the floppy softness of the black foam. The semantic and visual echo between the pots-and-pans drums of suburban children and the deer hide and wood drums of First Nations people are literally bound together in this piece.
Brian Jungen’s works create complex interrelationships between global consumer commodities and traditional First Nations objects. He often physically reworks brand-name products into forms associated with First Nations material culture, such as masks and teepees. More than a simple critique of American-European imperialism, Jungen’s hybrids are irreducible to either trajectory or even a one-way process of influence.
Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger was Farmer’s first kinetic sculpture that added a cinematic character to an “ever-reconfiguring play presented in real time.” The assembly of various objects and props on top of a large platform constitutes not only a work, but, to a certain extent, a show in itself...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner...
Starting with Bruce Nauman’s iconic artwork, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) , Mungo Thomson’s neon sign is one of a series that replaces Nauman’s quixotic mini-manifesto with aphorisms from ‘recovery’ culture, especially those made popular by alcoholics anonymous...
At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops...
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...
In Made In Heaven , we are face to face with a sculptural apparition, a divine visitation in the artist’s studio...
Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series, Detroit Photos , which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures...
Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...
To make his series Shadows (1980), Gaines subjected 20 potted plants to a uniform procedure...
Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California...
Continuing Oursler’s broader exploration of the moving image, Absentia is one of three micro-scale installations that incorporate small objects and tiny video projections within a miniature active proscenium...