Dimensions variable
Office Work by Walead Beshty consists of a partially deconstructed desktop monitor screen, cleanly speared through its center onto a metal pole. Despite its dismantled form, the screen still functions, a simple, mountain-range desktop background clearly visible with no distortion. As with much of Beshty’s work, Office Work thematizes its own construction, in this case, through a clearly deconstructive action that preserves the technological ontology present through the monitor. Rather than engage in outright destruction, Beshty carefully articulates the inner workings of the monitor outwards, alluding to the near violence of his action through the screen’s stark impalement. The work exists uneasily between display and destruction, disputing singularly positivist notions of constructing art.
Artist and writer Walead Beshty examines the processes of his own multidisciplinary (though primarily photographic) work’s production, linking these processes to global issues including human migration,displacement, and technology. His works, oftentimes visually abstracted, argue for their own production as a process of transformation, emphasizing an expansive array of actions and methods through which art can be structurally transformed or produced. In this way, by examining the matrix of production surrounding his individual artworks, Beshty’s introspection also expands outward onto a complex field of vectors connecting actions, subjects, structures, and forms. Beshty explores the limitations and possibilities of his mediums, which include photography, light, metal, glass, cardboard, and, often, distance. Often striking in their visual presence, his work reflects the movement of images and objects, both in a literal sense and in terms of the way that ideas and materials are circulated and exchanged. They also convey another narrative: the history and the processes that construct both the world and his art.
Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light...
Wolfgang Tillmans initiated the ongoing series Faltenwurf in 1989, representing compositions of unused clothing, with special attention paid to the ways in which they drape and fold...
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...
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...
Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light...
Wolfgang Tillmans initiated the ongoing series Faltenwurf in 1989, representing compositions of unused clothing, with special attention paid to the ways in which they drape and fold...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
Abstractions: Studies of the National Theatre | Londonist Concrete Beauty Of The National Theatre Captured In This Abstract Exhibition By Will Noble Will Noble Concrete Beauty Of The National Theatre Captured In This Abstract Exhibition "A lot of one’s reaction to concrete is prejudice," said the National Theatre's architect, Denys Lasdun...
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...
This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series...
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....
Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct...
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...
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...
Black Curl (CMY/Five Magnet: Irvine, California, March 25, 2010, Fujicolor Cyrstal Archive Super Type C, EM No 165-021, 05910) is a visually compelling photogram...
In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
The television monitors utilized in the video installation Come On (2008) ostensibly serve as playback devices for a multi-channel installation of clips from blockbuster films as part of a larger commentary of mass entertainment and its relation to consumer cultures...
In the video Blanco sobre Blanco (White on White) , we see a white man appearing in a white screen embedded into a white wall— alluding to Malevich’s White on White series...