Starting with Bruce Nauman’s iconic artwork, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) , Mungo Thomson’s neon sign is one of a series that replaces Nauman’s quixotic mini-manifesto with aphorisms from ‘recovery’ culture, especially those made popular by alcoholics anonymous. Thomson is referencing the lore that Nauman’s work (the first of many neons he’d make in the following years) had been inspired by a neon beer sign found in a corner-store in San Francisco that he used as his studio in the late 60s. This particular work has a self-critical subtext, as it also suggests the act of using another artist’s work, in an endless spiral of influence, is akin to a form of insanity.
Mungo Thomson is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist whose challenging works reveal a fascination with time, space, music, and perceptual phenomena in general. It has been pointed out that Thomson’s work privileges backgrounds: material (the white walls), institutional (the gallery), and historical.
MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...
While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves...
Her 2016 video installation quotes the sitcom-as-form and also draws from a 1907 comedic short, Laughing Gas...
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
Telescopic Pole is an adjustable telescopic pole that extends vertically from floor to ceiling and is held up by its own internal pressure...
Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining....
Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock...
A painting reminiscent of a certain “naive primitivism,” Untitled (Colors) and Untitled (Ghost) are representative of McCarthy’s work...
This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series...
Miljohn Ruperto’s high-definition video Janus takes its name from the two-faced Roman god of duality and transitions, of beginnings and endings, gates and doorways...
In Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012), Tossin documents the remains of Henry Ford’s rubber enterprise Fordlândia, built in 1928 in the Brazilian Amazon to export cultivated rubber for the booming automobile industry...
After being cast, the resulting resin block used in JCA-25-SC was cut into thin slices obtaining a series of rectangular shapes that resemble ceramic tiles...
Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination...
Blindseye Arranger (Max) (2013) features a greyscale arrangement of rudimentary shapes layered atop one another like a dense cluster of wood block prints, the juxtaposition of sharp lines and acute angles creating an abstracted field of rectangular and triangulated forms composed as if in a cubist landscape...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct...
In her 2011 webcam video, Sickhands , Cortright poses before her in-computer camera, as her hands, hair, and body begin waving and rippling vertically across the screen, distorted by software effects...
The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...