In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point. Calling up the unknown intimacies of these objects, McMillian upends their usual orientation, placing them directly on the wall to serve as paintings, rather than covers. Layering over the repurposed textiles with hardware store paint, McMillian transforms the sheets into canvases, creating abstract landscapes on top of the traces of human bodies intact in the fabric. His vibrant red composition from 2013 slips and drips from its edges onto the floor, with figure and ground evoking different scales of representation—the zoomed out, depopulated landscape created by the paint, and the human-scaled intimacy of the bedsheets.
Rodney McMillian works in many modes, creating sculptures, paintings, videos, performances, and installations that speak to the lived experiences of individuals and communities in the United States. Interested in the points at which larger systems and histories cross over into the personal, McMillian’s work seeks to address issues of race, gender, power, and class.
In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel...
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
In Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) , every front cover of TIME magazine is sequentially projected to scale at thirty frames per second...
Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
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...
The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
In establishing a deliberate distance between viewer and subject, Lassry raises questions about representation itself and how all portraits are, in effect, fully constructed objects that only gain meaning once we ascribe them with our own personal associations and emotions...
Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor...
Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...
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...
At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops...
Nicolas Paris studied architecture and worked as an elementary school teacher before he decided to become an artist...
A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s cloths drying rack (2007) was realized in the year of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
The black-and-white photograph Men (055, 065) (2012) depicts two similarly built young men – young and slim, with dark tousled hair and a square jaw line – seated aside one another in identical outfits...
Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...