The title Untitled Passport II was first used by Felix Gonzalez-Torres in an unlimited edition of small booklets, each containing sequenced photographs of a soaring bird against an open sky. Stacked in the shape of a cube and available for visitors to take away, the passports did not offer citizenship, but rather invited participation in a sense of borderless “being.” Colter Jacobsen’s Untitled (Untitled Passport II) is a diptych showing two-page spreads from Gonzalez-Torres’s booklet. The perfect graphite renderings freeze the book with its pages splayed, wings perpetually open. But we cannot help feeling that the boundless generosity of Gonzalez-Torres’s piece finds a limit in Jacobsen’s unique, but copied, original. These images are behind glass, their meanings overtly codified by the artist, whose notes appear in pencil around the edges.
Since 2003, Colter Jacobsen has gained in visibility and importance in the Bay Area art scene. His photographs, drawings, and installations are often evocative and possess a certain sublimity. The influence of artists from the Bay Area “Mission School” is manifest in Jacobsen’s predilection for creating installations and assemblages from materials bought in thrift stores, lost personal items found in the urban environment, and recycled packaging with unusual detail. Writer Kevin Killian has pointed out that many of his Jacobsen’s works deploy a very sophisticated gay semiotics.
Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor...
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This is not in Spanish looks at the ways in which the Chinese population in Mexico navigates the daily marginalization they encounter there...
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...
Half Dome Hough Transform by Trevor Paglen merges traditional American landscape photography (sometimes referred as ‘frontier photography’ for sites located in the American West) with artificial intelligence and other technological advances such as computer vision...
In Jackass (2008) by Ari Marcopoulos, his two sons, Cairo and Ethan, are pictured relaxing in a disheveled bedroom in their Sonoma home...
Trevor Paglen’s ongoing research focuses on artificial intelligence and machine vision, i.e...
The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...
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...
Continuing Oursler’s broader exploration of the moving image, Absentia is one of three micro-scale installations that incorporate small objects and tiny video projections within a miniature active proscenium...
Behind the simplicity and beauty of this untitled photograph of a brilliantly-colored flowerbed by Félix González-Torres are two remarkable stories of love, loss, and resilience...
Nuevo Dragon City is a reenactment of a historical event from 1927 in which six Chinese were either trapped or voluntarily hid themselves inside a building in northern Mexico...
Carland’s series of large-format photographs Lesbian Beds (2002) depicts beds that have been recently vacated...
Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience...
Sweet Jesus is a sound installation by Lutz Bacher that consists of a found recording of James Earl Jones’ iconic voice reciting biblical genealogy from Matthew, Book 1...