Arpedia

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. The title is taken from a Germanic term used in the context of art history, designating classical drapery. In this particular photograph, Faltenwurf (Stairwell) , an assortment of various colored clothes lay tangled on a set of stairs, as a sculpture of abstract forms.

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Untitled (Ruby Downing sitting between two Unidentified Men in a Room), Damaged series

Lisa Oppenheim

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material. For this project, Oppenheim procured the original glass negatives, which had been damaged over time, from the archives of this newspaper. She then printed the negatives as is, highlighting the multitude of physical flaws that had ‘spoiled’ the negatives.

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Untitled (Joseph T. Robinson Standing at a Podium in a Room), Damaged series

Lisa Oppenheim

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Untitled (Governor of Ohio Judson Harmon), Damaged series

Lisa Oppenheim

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Untitled (Sten-Frenke House #04)

Luisa Lambri

Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon. Designed by the architect Richard Neutra, its gray glass, white expanses, and simple forms exude austerity. Luisa Lambri’s photograph Untitled (Sten-Frenke House #04) (2007)recalls the unembellished elegance of the structure while also alluding to modernist painting; the image is less a picture than an abstract expanse that conveys its own flatness.

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EASTER MORNING

Bruce Conner

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. The video presents us with a reinterpretation of footage from his unreleased avant-garde film, Easter Morning Raga , from 1966. In contrast to his more famous pieces like A Movie (1958) and Crossroads (1976) which are juxtapositions of fragments from newsreels, soft-core pornography, and B movies, the images in EASTER MORNING serve as a reinterpretation of footage.

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Ropes

Sarah Conaway

Ropes

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Untitled Inkblot Drawing (CT-1491)

Bruce Conner

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. Untitled Inkblot Drawing (CT-1491) (1995) is representative of his aspect of his practice. It is a formal exploration related to many different things: the Rorschach inkblot testing used by psychologists, Japanese calligraphy, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the intricate patterning Conner saw everywhere in the world around him.

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27 Punk Photos: 11. Dim Wanker: F Word, May, 1978

Bruce Conner

In 1977, as an already-established artist best known for his films, Bruce Conner began to photograph punk rock shows at Mabuhay Gardens, a San Francisco club and music venue. 27 Punk Photos: 11. Dim Wanker: F Word, May, 1978 (1978) is representative of a series of photographs by Conner, whose subject became a fascination for the artist.

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#17 Pink

James Welling

#17 Pink is a photogram, a photographic image produced without the use of a camera. Here, the artist placed plumbago blossoms on a sheet of eight-by-ten-inch film and exposed it to light. The negative was then projected onto Kodak Metallic Endura paper through a color mural enlarger and cooler filters to produce the multicolored print.

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Stowe

James Welling

Welling employs simple materials like crumpled aluminum foil, wrinkled fabric and pastry dough and directly exposes them as photograms, playing with the image in the process of revealing it. Although Welling’s approach to photography is more conceptually oriented than poetic, the resulting image in Stowe (a direct photogram of a crumpled piece of cloth) somehow resembles a curtain, perhaps suggesting that an artificial even fictive component in photographic representation. While the curtain might echo other imagery, Welling’s approach is not allegorical but rather abstract in a way that reinforces the materiality of the object.

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Sunday (Domingo)

Rivane Neuenschwander

In this video, a parrot chews on seeds printed with punctuation marks. A radio on the shelf in the background broadcasts the news of an unfolding football match. As the game (and video) progresses, the bird eats all of the remaining punctuation.

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Mapa Mundi BR (postal)

Rivane Neuenschwander

Installation (Installation)

Mapa-Mundi BR (postal) is a set of wooden shelves holding postcards that depict locations in Brazil named for foreign countries and cities. When installed, viewers are invited to fill out and mail a postcard to any destination, an act which parallels the dissemination and global circulation of image, text, and the idea of place.

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London calendar

Rivane Neuenschwander

London calendar

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Untitled (Miller House, #02)

Luisa Lambri

Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California. Commissioned by industrialist J. Irwin Miller and his wife Xenia Simons Miller, and built by Richard Neutra in 1937, the Miller house’s open and flowing layout expands upon modernist architectural traditions. It features a flat roof, stone and glass walls, with rooms configured beneath a grid pattern of skylights and supporting cruciform steel columns.

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Untitled (Schindler House, #01)

Luisa Lambri

Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light. The architect’s longtime studio and residence, which he built in Los Angeles in 1922, exemplifies this philosophy, and has since become an influential part of the modernist architectural canon. In Untitled (Schindler House #01) (2007), Luisa Lambri describes Schindler’s studio by capturing its aftereffects—the play of light and shadow cast through branches onto a surface.

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Untitled (Shuffle)

Wallace Berman

While Untitled (Shuffle) presents the same formal characteristics as the rest of Berman’s verifax collages, this constellation of specific images inside the radio’s frames—the Star of David, Hebrew characters, biblical animals—have Jewish symbolism and attest to the artist’s lasting obsession with the kabala. The piece’s sub-title, “Shuffle,” suggests the presence of chance and randomness in any given organization of elements.

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Untitled

Wallace Berman

Untitled

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I am Human, Abstract Foil, No Humans IV

Chris Johanson

Painting (Painting)

Chris Johanson’s paintings, sculptures, and installations break down everyday scenes and commonplace dramas into colorful forms; the darkest sides of humanity are invoked with humor. The works comment on subjects such as capitalism, consumerism, the art world, and therapy. The triptych I Am a Human, Abstract Foil, No Humans IV (2004) is a meditation on the cosmos.

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Splinters and Seconal

Ed Ruscha

Painting (Painting)

In 1970, Ruscha began a series of paintings made from stains. He experimented with a variety of materials (gun powder, dust, blood, among many others) to leave surface traces of different objects. The resulting images are negative shapes amidst blurry environments like Splinters and Seconal in which a grey surface is imprinted with the materials mentioned in the title.

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Untitled (Breathless)

Ian Wallace

Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless). The work uses collage techniques—it is stapled down and has a thick strip of contact sheet paper taped over it—that convert the media coverage on Godard’s film into a filmic object itself. The black paper enacts a kind of cinematic “jump cut” on the article, while simultaneously drawing attention to the medium of the film, as well as the photograph reproduced in this newspaper article.

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Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan)

Ian Wallace

Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world. Patches of canvas cover parts of this otherwise representational photograph and ask the viewer to consider the role that editing and play in our perception of the urban landscape and modernity.

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When Need Moves The Earth

Som Supaparinya

When Need Moves the Earth is a three-channel video that combines elements of documentary footage, archival material and abstract aerial shots to encompass a painterly yet forthright exploration of a coal mine and a water dam in Thailand. A meditation on the impact of industrialization on the natural environment, the work highlights the drastic alterations that these operations leave in its place. Som Supaparinya’s work is often a commentary on political, social, and personal issues.

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Scene from Masculin/Féminin

Ian Wallace

Scene from Masculin/Féminin

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Koropa

Laura Henno

In 2009, Laura Henno began research in the archipelago Comoros for her first film Koropa the first episode of a triptych— completed in 2016. Mayotte is the only remaining island belonging to France in the archipelago of the Comoros, which gained independence in 1975, creating an invisible border that divides the islands from Europe. Koropa is the portrait of a particular relationship: that of Ben, a former fisherman turned smuggler, and Patron, a child who makes his first smuggling voyage between the island of Anjouan and Mayotte.

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Sundown (Number Twenty)

Xaviera Simmons