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...
Catherine Opie’s candid photograph Cathy (bed Self-portrait) (1987) shows the artist atop a bed wearing a negligee and a dildo; the latter is attached to a whip that she holds in her teeth...
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...
Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision...
Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...
Although best known as a provocateur and portraitist, Opie also photographs landscapes, cityscapes, and architecture...
Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage...
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...
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...
Chris Johanson’s Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat) (2010) pictures a canoe drifting toward an off-kilter horizon line, which demarcates the cobalt sea from the cerulean sky...
War Footage is a series of wall-mounted works composed of 16mm film leader, tightly bound to flag-shaped panels by the artist...
Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom...
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...
Central Station, Alignment, and Argument are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
Like many of Opie’s works, Mike and Sky presents female masculinity to defy a binary understanding of gender...
#17 Pink is a photogram, a photographic image produced without the use of a camera...