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.
Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...
Chris Johanson’s paintings, sculptures, and installations break down everyday scenes and commonplace dramas into colorful forms; the darkest sides of humanity are invoked with humor...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...
Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage...
A painting reminiscent of a certain “naive primitivism,” Untitled (the way in is the way out) is representative of McCarthy’s work...
The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...
Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters...
This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...
Sign #1 , Sign #2 , Sign #3 were included in “Found Object Assembly”, Copeland’s 2009 solo show at Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco...
In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
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...
In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
In line with Hernández’s interest in catastrophe, Vulnerabilia (choques) is a collection of images of shipwrecks and Vulnerabilia (naufragios) collects scenes of car crashes...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...