Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content. Meaning, therefore, changes depending on one’s perspective—and in the case of Thomas’ installation, only emerges when one knows that there is always something hidden, always more to one of his works than immediately meets the eye. This lenticular print with text shifts as you walk in front of it from its title, “Black Imitates White” to the inverse, “White Imitates Black”(and some other possibilities in between) emphasizing that there are always at least two perspectives to the same scenario, and thereby encouraging us as viewers to consider them all together rather than trying to identify with any one subjectivity.
Employing the visual language and terminology of mass media, and appropriating symbols and images from popular culture, Hank Willis Thomas’ work seeks to question and subvert established definitions and positions with regards to personal identity and the narrative of race. Working across installation, photography, video, and media work, Thomas maintains his photo conceptualist roots, primarily taking source material from found photographs and archives. These images form the basis from which the artist seeks to uncover the fallacies that history claims as truth. His work illustrates how the way history is represented and consumed reinforces generalizations surrounding identity, gender, race and ethnicity, and that as an artist he has an opportunity to expose or to revise those histories from the points of view of the oppressed.
In Stong Sory Vegetables , Laure Prouvost explains that she woke up one morning and that some vegetables had fallen from the sky on her bed, making a hole in her ceiling...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
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....
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage...
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Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...
Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
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...
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 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...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
Foreigners Everywhere is a series of neon signs in several different languages...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
In the Collage II (Marie) (2013), Shorr seems to have an ostensibly clear subject, a female subject identified in the work’s title as “Marie,” a slim but athletic woman with brown hair pictured reclining atop a brilliantly white sheet draped against a marbled tan-and-white backdrop...
For Immersion , Harun Farocki went to visit a research centre near Seattle specialized in the development of virtual realities and computer simulations...
In her geometric paintings on wood panel, Madriz employs the Fibonacci numbers to illustrate, in simplified form, the pattern of natural plant growth—beginning from a single stem, and growing exponentially, rationally, and efficiently outward from there...
Carlton Hotel project is the second part of a research on the Carlton, an iconic building of modernist architecture from the 1960s in Beirut...
Kovanda’s street interventions are always documented according to the same format as the actions: a piece of A4 paper, a typewritten text giving a precise location and date, and a photograph...