The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources. Growing up in an African-American community in Los Angeles, Capistran has long been influenced by hip-hop culture. The photographs in this print document him surreptitiously breakdancing on Carl Andre’s iconic lead floor piece after the guards at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have left the gallery. Each of the twenty-five frames depicts a classic breakdance move. Wearing a working-class outfit, Capistran intentionally emphasizes the vernacular aspect of this art form and his personal engagement challenges the hierarchy between street culture and high art.
Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Juan Capistran was undocumented until midway through grade school. As a teenager he gravitated toward graffiti, punk rock, reggae, house music, and DJ culture as tools for crafting a hybrid identity. His work has diverse influences, from Malcolm X to Led Zeppelin and Richard Serra, and it quotes keenly and democratically, from gang colors to minimalist forms.
Long Long Live (2013) takes the viewer to the setting of the Oasis Villa on Green Island, once a reform and re-education prison to house political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period...
Vallance’s Rocket is a vibrant picture in which masses of color and collage coalesce into a central vehicle, yet the whole surface seems lit with the roar of space travel...
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...
In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form...
Long Long Live (2013) takes the viewer to the setting of the Oasis Villa on Green Island, once a reform and re-education prison to house political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period...
Vallance’s Rocket is a vibrant picture in which masses of color and collage coalesce into a central vehicle, yet the whole surface seems lit with the roar of space travel...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat...
A Sculptural Travertine Staircase Takes Centre Stage in RDAI’s Hermès Vienna Store Renovation - IGNANT Name RDAI Words Anna Dorothea Ker In the landmark-laden Graben District at the heart of Vienna, the interior architecture of a newly renovated and expanded Hermès store in an 18th-century building honors the arthistorical riches of its city...
Pau-Brasil is a sculpture by Thiago Honório that references Oswald de Andrade’s 1925 classic of Brazilian modernist literature of the same title...
Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation...
For Untitled, Caesar encased recycled objects such as scraps of plywood, paper or cloth in resin and then cut and reassembled the pieces into abstract forms...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light...
White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form...
The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...
Part of a larger series of photographic works, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck’s Corrupted file from page 14 (V1) from the series La Vega, Plan Caracas No...
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...
Foreigners Everywhere is a series of neon signs in several different languages...