Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner. Its tiled effect can perhaps be seen as a vertical Carl Andre work and also bears some resemblance to another work in the Kadist Collection, Jedediah Caesar’s JCA-25-SC. McGee’s installation also echoes the votive altars in the chapels he visited during his residency in Brazil in 1993. One almost expects to see candles lit below the work honoring the dead or loved ones in crisis. This is appropriate since the individual elements in Untitled depict and honor the disenfranchised, outcasts, and sometimes ghosts of San Francisco street life.
San Francisco-based artist Barry McGee graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991 with a concentration in painting and printmaking and is considered a central figure in the Mission School movement. His work is heavily influenced by graffiti, comic books, skateboard culture, green culture, and social activism and usually reflects, with a pessimistic view, upon the urban environment that surrounds him. McGee’s large-scale painting installations often take a particular iconography in which a background of abstract, acid-colored patterns is overlayed with text and figures.
The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964)...
The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California results from Lockhart’s prolonged investigation of an agricultural center and community...
Working independently, Herndon experimented at the forefront of a now-canonical method—appropriation—by painting additions into found images from magazines such as Life and Sports Illustrated in a way that imbues the resulting works with mythical significance...
Michelle Handelman’s video work Irma Vep, The Last Breath takes its inspiration from Musidora, a famous French silent film actress, and a character she played called Irma Vep, from the film Les Vampires (1915), directed by Louis Feuillade...
The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history...
The Wooden People is a 360º virtual reality film series comprising seven episodes...
Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
I Am Cuba— “Soy Cuba” in Spanish; “Ya Kuba” in Russian—is a Soviet/Cuban film produced in 1964 by director Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm...
Silver & Gold combines video, performance, and original costumes into a self-proclaimed “filmformance” that evokes the legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his tribute to 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez in a magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race, glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen...
To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey...
In Dorian, a cinematic perfume, video is used as a community gatherer, a tool to speak about particular subcultures, in this case the trans-gender drag queen New York community, past and present...
Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger was Farmer’s first kinetic sculpture that added a cinematic character to an “ever-reconfiguring play presented in real time.” The assembly of various objects and props on top of a large platform constitutes not only a work, but, to a certain extent, a show in itself...
Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and riffing on the “I Want You” army recruitment campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, Labat asked Bay Area residents to interpret the slogan and make their own demands of the public in a series of live performance auditions...
McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works...
The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history...
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...