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. An orange-haired figure, oar positioned in mid-stroke, looks ahead—whether toward an edge or an infinite expanse, it is impossible to tell. Echoing a trope that recurs in Greek epic poetry, transcendental painting, and current-day reality television, the character is alone with nature. We witness—and likely empathize with—his voyage.
The prolific Chris Johanson produces paintings, zines, installations, and sculptures that are notable for their earnest, almost childlike abstraction. His work delves unabashedly into the emotional, social, and spiritual aspects of human nature, tracking points of commonality and difference using simple shapes and lines as well as an unflagging sense of magnanimous humor.
Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...
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...
Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California...
Every work in Hoeber’s 2011 series Execution Changes is titled in alphanumeric code...
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...
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...
This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat...
In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
This particular drawing, like many of Grotjahn’s works, presents a decentered single-point perspective...
Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape...
Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco...
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...
The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources...
In Tapitapultas (2012), Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker comment on mass consumerism and pollution by way of a game they invented...
Destilaciones ( Distillations , 2014) is an installation composed of a group of ceramic pots, presented on the floor and within a steel structure...