Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

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.

Painting (Painting)

Reeder’s works often start with language—and his Pasta Paintings are no different. After the phrase for the title came through his head, the artist set about trying to figure out how to make a mark with pasta. These paintings are the result, made using the pasta as something of a stencil, with the paint being applied after the noodles have been scattered on the painting’s blank surface.

Photography (Photography)

Mosaic Collage (Fang Banger)

Photography (Photography)

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

“We both died at the same moment” is a humorous observation of anthropomorphism, the attribution of human emotions to nature and animals. A siliquaria armata is a slitworm that loosley-coiles a shell. Growing inside a sea-bed, a siliquaria armata will grow vertically until it touches another siliquaria armata, at which point they will knot together.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Drowned Wood Standing Coiled (2011) consists of two sculptures, inextricably linked. In each, pieces of driftwood are bundled together vertically and entwined with rope, which cascades to the floor in a tightly wound coil. Placed side by side on the ground, these sculptures anthropomorphize into partners who are literally and figuratively bound.

Photography (Photography)

Carland’s series of large-format photographs Lesbian Beds (2002) depicts beds that have been recently vacated. Shot from directly above, they are lavish views of very private spaces. The artist plays to her viewers’ voyeuristic impulses, inviting us to look, but then denying us the opportunity to study the figures to whom the sheets belong, so that the rumpled covers become like anthropomorphic stand-ins inviting empathic projection.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

View of Harbor by Jon Rafman mines the latent cultural imaginary surrounding climate change and society’s collective death drive. In contrast with other recent works that aim to use VR or AR to visualize the impact of climate change, Rafman’s work instead presents the rising sea as an almost anthropomorphized foe, within which strange human-like bodies lurk as the viewer is swept into a kind of watery hellscape. This strong element of fantasy leads the viewer to wonder what type of wish fulfillment is at play—what desire for the museum to be inundated, for the existing social order to be washed away by the deluge?

Photography (Photography)

In Linda, Lee & Dorsey, Louis (1988~, 2018) Marcel Pardo Ariza draws on Bay Area queer histories that have been uncovered from local archives and queer organizations, and connects them to people currently living in the Bay, where Ariza is also based. This particular portrait features a skein of arms and legs, in both color and black and white print, intimately woven together. Tender and sensual, the tangle of limbs incorporates both stereotypically feminine and masculine traits in various skin tones.

Painting (Painting)

Readymade Flea Market is part of a series of works developed by Hun Kyu Kim. While the artist’s previous work drew a parallel between capitalism’s inherent social violence and the evolution of weaponry, Hun Kyu Kim now focuses on political nihilism and how to overcome it. In this new work he uses the metaphor of 3D Graphic Space to represent our current reality.

Coué 1 is an animated sculpture that hypnotically highlights the self-motivating leitmotiv of the ‘Coué Method’: “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”This is the mantra that is repeated by different male and female voices in the soundtrack – first in an incomprehensible painfully slow slur, becoming clear and speeding up into a drilling hilarious sounding high pitching spin, as if helium had been inhaled. This work was commissioned by the Association GEF Psy in Nancy under the aegis of the Fondation de France in order to commemorate Emile Coué (1857-1926) who was a French behavioral psychologist and pharmacist who particularly studied the effects of positive thinking. Séchas also created a Monument to Jacques Lacan in 2002 featuring the cat, his house-style character.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits. The monumental and unnatural aspect of the baobabs turns them into strange and anthropomorphic personalities. Adding to the descriptive aspect of the film, the sound is a recording of the environment, of sounds made by animals, and participates in this peaceful contemplation.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

For Piedras Blancas , arguably his most ambitious and visually arresting video to date, Miguel Angel Ríos made 3,000 “piedras” out of a concrete/stone composite. The video is shot in arid, mountainous locations in Mexico (his adopted country) and Argentina (his home country). Over several months, Ríos scouted locations for natural-worn tributaries where he eventually allowed these balls to then thunder down the mountain.

Painting (Painting)

G. S. F. C. #3 (Geometrical Sci-Fi Cyborg) belongs to a series of paintings that build upon the artist’s exploration into feminist speculative fiction and the cyborg as a creature of contemporary reality and fiction. The cyborg painting, as she calls it, is made through a smearing of human and machine in which the composition of color landscape with outlines of anthropomorphized forms is stenciled and airbrushed onto canvas, then photographed an printed onto canvas. Once this is done, Minoliti goes back over the printed canvas with paint.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

A steel clothing rack adorned with turbine vents, Moroccan vintage jewelry, pinecones and knitting yarn, these heterogeneous elements are used here to create an exotic yet undefined identity within the work. Following Haegue Yang’s 2010 anthropomorphic series Medicine Men, this sculpture appears as a shamanic objet or being. It is mobile and can be activated.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Fig. 33. 9 Your Love is a King by Yeni Mao is a sculpture made of blackened steel, brass, glazed ceramic, and leather.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

“To me, art equals responsibility”. That is probably why Alain Séchas creates works according to the human scale, immediately evoking the human body. But rather than using the human figure, he chose that of the cat: a round-eyed feline which never smiles.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Blindfold Receptor (caterpillar-yellow) by Leelee Chan is inspired by the camouflaging nature of the peppered-moth caterpillar. In 1800s Europe, during the industrial revolution, light-colored moths evolved into a darker color after trees in their habitat darkened by the polluting soot. Today, due to rapid human changes to the environment, caterpillars can adapt even before they metamorphose into moths, mimicking the colour of the branches they inhabit.

Painting (Painting)

The Shedding by Anju Dodiya is part of a series of mattress paintings the artist creates using fabric stretched on padded and shaped boards. The imagery relates to other paintings in this body work that expresses the visceral and vulnerable side of creativity. The posture of the protagonist—a part-human, part-carapaced animal—is opening herself outwardly.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

A cat, standing like a human being, is looking at us with round and dazed eyes and holds a gun. In the background, we notice a range of unwelcoming buildings, closed in with barbwire. A sentence is inscribed inside of one of the clouds, as if it were a speech bubble, and comments ?with hope or disillusion?

Painting (Painting)

Particularly shaped by his own youth in the 1990s, his recent works have incorporated things like a marijuana leaf, a dragon-emblazoned chain wallet, metal grommets, and the ubiquitous (in the 90s) Stussy symbol. Reflecting and recouping elements from American youth culture, Reini’s works question how we package, mark, and express ourselves through manufactured symbols of identity. Reini has also used images of Mickey Mouse—Disney’s anthropomorphic icon—in numerous works, including in this pair of works, The More You Want…, …The Less You Get .

Installation (Installation)

A woman pronounces parts of sentences. Via rigorous editing, the artist creates anticipation with the silences, rhythm by the repetitions, temporal ellipses with music. The recording is diffused by a loud speaker placed on a plinth which gives the whole an anthropomorphic status which reminds one of Box with the sound of its own making by Robert Morris.

Painting (Painting)

Mogeji’s Journey (2014) depicts three hand painted stills from an animated sequence in Aki Kondo’s film Hikari (Light) (2015). Kondo’s film tells the story of a young woman named Juneko who discovers that she is terminally ill and the ways that this impacts her lover, a painter, who tries to reconnect with her by painting her portrait from memory. As Juneko becomes sicker, her hair begins to fall out, a symptom of her unnamed illness.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Diego Bianchi’s main concern is distorting straight lines, both literally and metaphorically. To him, deviation is the only feasible strategy to allow the unexpected to happen, making space for semantic turns, impossible encounters, and dissolving binaries. The bodily dimension appears in his art both as disturbance of the senses and perception, and as research into processes of consumerism, oppression, decomposition, and destruction.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Hikari (Light) (2015) depicts a fantastical and wrenching story about Juneko, a terminally ill young woman who communicates with her lover, a painter, through a portrait of her produced shortly after her death. As Juneko becomes sicker, her hair begins to fall out, a symptom of her unnamed illness. As her condition deteriorates, the film toggles back and forth with the animated story of Mogeji, a white strand of hair inhabiting Juneko’s body who becomes anthropomorphized through Kondo’s animation and recounts his own story of mortality and loss.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Calderón & Piñeros (La Decanatura) refer to Sólheimasandur as a work that tackles the issue of “the ruin as a tourist destination.” As they say, “at the end, tourists become an essential part of this unusual, beautiful, and—at the same time—banal landscape.” The video features a plane wreck on Sólheimasandur beach in Iceland, where a navy plane belonging to the United States Army crashed in 1973 due to fuel exhaustion. The plane appears as an anthropomorphized figure: lying on the sands of the beach without its wings, it resembles a sculptural torso that has lost all its limbs, with cables coming out of its body appearing as internal organs. These injuries remind the viewer of the danger inherent in these artifacts, and the potential for both heroism and death implicit in flying them to far-away territories.