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.
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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...
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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...
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...
The Black Canyon Deep Semantic Image Segments 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...
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Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...
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...
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...
Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...