Lara uses things readily at hand to create objects and situations that interrogate the processes of art and the spectrum of roles that art and artists play in society. To these ends, she has used furniture, projections, photographs, clothing, and even people as her materials. A reflection on how the production of meaning itself takes place in the manufacturing of things is embodied in wooden hand chairs, a crafty Indonesian version of the iconic Pedro Friedeberg 1960s Pop design. Facing one another and pulling a tight thread between their fingers as if playing a game, The Thinkers (2014) is a magnified version of the practice of weaving, with the hand as the primary technological tool. Part readymade, part joke, and part examination of the role of the artist, the significance of this simple gesture hinges on the feeling of discontinuity, the shift in consciousness, that it provokes.
Adriana Lara is fascinated by how a single thing (an object, a photograph, a song, a text) can be transformed into a work of art. This process does not relate to formal alteration or the application of expert skill, but rather to a simple act of articulation. Rather than relying on the physical creation of something new, this becomes that (namely, art) because the artist declares it to be so. This special kind of alchemy imbues all of Lara’s objects with a restless ambiguity. Much like her art, Lara is something of a shape-shifter herself, moving between the roles of artist, curator, musician, or writer whenever it suits her needs.
buZ Blurr, One Telling of the “Origin Story” at Straat Museum Amsterdam | Brooklyn Street Art BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY In the shifting culturescapes of urban contemporary art, STRAAT Museum’s latest exhibition, “Moniker: An Origin Story,” emerges as a poignant narrative that bridges the transient heritage of hobo monikers with the vibrant pulse of today’s street art scene...
Eileen Quinlan’s abstracted images, like Swipe , rely on the manipulation of photographic materials inside the studio itself, and reject the exterior world for complex interrogations of the medium....
“Dark Clouds Of The Future” is a cinematographic video animation of the abandoned gold mine in Brazil, Serra Pelada (“Naked Mountain”)...
Memorial for intersections #2 (2013) is a minimalist, black metallic structure that contains the brightly colored translucent circles, triangles, rectangles, and squares that originally were presented in Pica’s performance work A ? B ? C (2013)...
Taking archaeology as her departure point to examine the trajectories of replicated and displaced objects, “Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time?” was produced in Oaxaca for her exhibition of the same title at the Contemporary Museum of Oaxaca (MACO) in 2015...
Do ut des (2009) is part of an ongoing series of books that Castillo Deball has altered with perforations, starting from the front page and working inward, forming symmetrical patterns when each spread is opened...
Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle...
Hand Study (Making in Whiteness) IIII by Carmen Winant is part of a series of five collages...