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 the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
For his series of digital collages Excerpt (Sealed)… Rhodes appropriated multiple images from mass media and then sprayed an X on top of their glass and frame...
Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...
Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor...
In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
Re: Looking marks a new phase in Wong’s work which connects his region’s history with other parts of the world...
MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...
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...
The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel...
Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees...
Days of Our Lives: Reading is from a series of work was created for the 10th Biennale de Lyon by the artist...
Created for the tenth Lyon Bienniale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society...