Reeder’s works often start with language—and his Pasta Paintings are no different. After the phrase for the title came through his head, the artist set about trying to figure out how to make a mark with pasta. These paintings are the result, made using the pasta as something of a stencil, with the paint being applied after the noodles have been scattered on the painting’s blank surface. The serene, patterned surfaces that this process creates are at odds, somewhat, with the simplicity and the absurdity of their making.
Detroit-based artist Scott Reeder threads his multimedia works through with humor and a dry sense of irony. His output ranges widely, and includes sculpture, painting, and curatorial projects among other things. No matter his medium, there is always a certain acerbic wit to Reeder’s work—a wit that can be both blithe and slightly confrontational. It’s a sense of humor that, as an artist, he traces back to the visual puns of Duchamp, or to the simple, deadpan forms of John McCracken and Blinky Palermo. For Reeder, the punch line is often the practice of making art itself; he mines the absurdity of the artist’s life for works that speak both comically and poignantly, at times, to the creative process.
Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape...
The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights...
In Tapitapultas (2012), Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker comment on mass consumerism and pollution by way of a game they invented...
Welling employs simple materials like crumpled aluminum foil, wrinkled fabric and pastry dough and directly exposes them as photograms, playing with the image in the process of revealing it...
Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago...
Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...
Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely...
Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision...
This particular drawing, like many of Grotjahn’s works, presents a decentered single-point perspective...
Justice (2014) presents viewers with a curious assemblage: a wooden gallows with slightly curved spindles protruding from the topmost plank, which in turn is covered with rudimentary netting, the threads slackly dangling like a loose spider’s web or an rib cage that’s been cracked open...
The Last Post was inspired by Sikander’s ongoing interest in the colonial history of the sub-continent and the British opium trade with China...
Itch explores the relationship between technology and daily human experience with a motorized arm that extends from within the gallery’s wall, moving up and down while holding a projector that shows a desperately scratching pair of hands....
Like many of Opie’s works, Mike and Sky presents female masculinity to defy a binary understanding of gender...
Bruce Conner is best known for his experimental films, but throughout his career he also worked with pen, ink, and paper to create drawings ranging from psychedelic patterns to repetitious inkblot compositions...
Chris Johanson’s Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat) (2010) pictures a canoe drifting toward an off-kilter horizon line, which demarcates the cobalt sea from the cerulean sky...