White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form. Here, Capistran humorously remixes the form and style of Frank Stella’s Black Paintings with California punk rock band Black Flag’s song title and logo (created by artist Raymond Pettibon). White Minority , then, appropriates, recontextualizes, and riffs on language and visual signs to unmoor notions of identity, power, and revolution.
Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Juan Capistran was undocumented until midway through grade school. As a teenager he gravitated toward graffiti, punk rock, reggae, house music, and DJ culture as tools for crafting a hybrid identity. His work has diverse influences, from Malcolm X to Led Zeppelin and Richard Serra, and it quotes keenly and democratically, from gang colors to minimalist forms.
Long Long Live (2013) takes the viewer to the setting of the Oasis Villa on Green Island, once a reform and re-education prison to house political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period...
Vallance’s Rocket is a vibrant picture in which masses of color and collage coalesce into a central vehicle, yet the whole surface seems lit with the roar of space travel...
The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell...
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage...
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...
Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Oliver Laric’s video Versions is part of an ongoing body of work that has continued to evolve and mutate over time...
To make his series Shadows (1980), Gaines subjected 20 potted plants to a uniform procedure...
In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...
Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat...
The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel...
Days of Our Lives: Reading is from a series of work was created for the 10th Biennale de Lyon by the artist...