3:40 minutes
In Tapitapultas (2012), Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker comment on mass consumerism and pollution by way of a game they invented. The artists used disposable spoons as catapults to shoot thousands of plastic bottle caps at a hole in a concrete platform. The platform was once part of a U. S. military installation in the Panama Canal Zone, and it is now an observation deck in a nature park. As the video comes to an end, the viewer discovers that the bottle caps that fell through the hole accumulated on the forest floor, forming a giant mountain of synthetic waste in the natural landscape.
Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker, who also exhibit individually, have been making work together since 2006, often using a playful approach to address serious sociopolitical themes. Conlon has a background in science and sculpture, and Harker’s is in film and media studies. Their videos merge Conlon’s use of ordinary objects and investigations of human behavior with Harker’s irony and subversion of conventional storytelling methods. Their playful and poetic critiques of contemporary culture frequently use discarded objects to comment on consumption, accumulation, climate, and the ironic beauty of waste-ridden landscapes. Specifically, they examine contradictions in the construction of Panamanian national identity, as well as political and societal disparities between Central America and the United States.
Uncertain Pilgrimage is an ongoing project in which Moore draws from his unplanned travels in recent years...
La Sombra (The Shadow) is a video of Regina Jose Galindo performing with a moving Leopard tank...
Reeder’s works often start with language—and his Pasta Paintings are no different...
War Footage is a series of wall-mounted works composed of 16mm film leader, tightly bound to flag-shaped panels by the artist...
Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
In this work, a woman sits on a couch with her shirt pulled up to expose her pierced nipples, which are connected by a chain...
Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
The Last Post was inspired by Sikander’s ongoing interest in the colonial history of the sub-continent and the British opium trade with China...
Like many of Opie’s works, Mike and Sky presents female masculinity to defy a binary understanding of gender...
In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
A steel clothing rack adorned with turbine vents, Moroccan vintage jewelry, pinecones and knitting yarn, these heterogeneous elements are used here to create an exotic yet undefined identity within the work...
Central Station, Alignment, and Argument are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...
In 2012, former Guatemalan President José Efran Ros Montt was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity; Regina José Galindo’s video Tierra is a chilling reimagining of the atrocities recounted during his trial...
Chris Johanson’s paintings, sculptures, and installations break down everyday scenes and commonplace dramas into colorful forms; the darkest sides of humanity are invoked with humor...
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...
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...
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...