Photography (Photography)

His series, The Golden State, harkens back to his early career and his photographic training. Using a still camera to compose the fifty images of the series, Jones turns his lens on the vernacular architecture of California’s southern region, looking at the iconic and idiosyncratic spaces that define a region. William E. Jones is a filmmaker, writer, and artist whose interests lie in the circulation of images—images that are broadcast, images that are hidden, and images that become imbedded in our collective consciousness.

Photography (Photography)

In the early 20th century, the Hercules Engine Company was doing a brisk business producing customized, heavy-duty engines. Seventy years later, when the United States military started opting for Humvees and stock parts, the company began to fail, and it entirely ceased production in 1999. Hercules Engines, Abandoned, Canton, Ohio (2011) depicts the manufacturer’s former productive core, gone fallow.

Photography (Photography)

In Restaurant, Canton, Ohio (2011), a convenience store offers food, liquor, and Coca Cola to an empty street. A series of boarded-up storefronts marred by peeling paint conveys a sense of the pre- or post-apocalyptic—the hush just before or after a disaster. The reds, pinks, and oranges of the buildings give off warmth, but the absence of human activity makes the glow eerie and strange.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Killed is a video projection in which William E. Jones appropriated and edited, in a rapid sequence, a selection from the more than 68,000 censored or discarded films produced by the Farm Security Administration’s photographers between 1935 and 1943. Roy Emerson Stryker, the then director of the program, was in charge of what he called “killing” negatives by punching holes in them to render them unusable. Killed continues Jones’s use of discarded film footage seen in his video created from vintage 1970s and 1980s gay porn that was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Taiwan WMD (Taiwan and Weapons of Mass Destruction) is part of a long-term research started in early 2010 on the history and aftermath effects of Japanese biological and chemical warfare in China during WWII, as well as the unknown history of Taiwan’s nuclear program. T. Hong’s research is not only an effort to revisit a dark time that complicates certain histories, but more importantly an investigation of how violence is enacted in the name of rationality.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lessons of the Blood by James T. Hong pieces together interviews, extensive archival and field research, and TV footage addressing Japan’s use of biological warfare and experimentation on Chinese prisoners during World War II, as well as the revisionism of the Japanese government and Chinese survivors’ attempts to live with this horrific history and to find justice. Co-written, directed, edited and produced with Yin-Ju Chen, whose work is also represented in the Kadist collection, Lessons of the Blood is a meditation on propaganda, the ways in which national mythologies can literally infect and poison the most vulnerable among us, and the legacy of World War II in China, presented through the testimonies of survivors, academics, medical experts, nationalists and activists. The film locates its genesis in the publication of the New History Textbook in Japan in 2000, which infamously glossed over the Japanese Empire’s wartime atrocities, sparking rage and violent protests in China and South Korea in 2005.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

let this be us is a single-channel video by Richard T. Walker featuring the artist himself roaming around the wilderness of a deserted landscape, sporadically humming a melody, strumming a guitar, or playing a few notes on a keyboard. As he traverses between striking locations we see him carrying large photographic prints of the same landscape that he is treading, which he then rests onto tripods so that the horizon in the photograph seamlessly matches that of the real landscape. As we hear the music, Walker comes in and out of view, dissipating into the landscape as his body becomes invisible, hidden behind the photographic prints.

Painting (Painting)

T, Chapter 24

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

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.

Installation (Installation)

Sweet Jesus is a sound installation by Lutz Bacher that consists of a found recording of James Earl Jones’ iconic voice reciting biblical genealogy from Matthew, Book 1. Lutz has edited the recording by slowing it down slightly and adding background sound from the same recording. In Lutz’s edit, these are all the names of the ancestors of Jesus leading up to Joseph, but she leaves Jesus out of it, then reverses chronologically.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The artist’s Passings series are hand-sewn works composed of radiological scans of items of clothing loaned by the Tiraz Foundation in Jordan. These articles – Palestinian, Jordanian and other Arab costumes from the 19th and 20th centuries from the Widad Kamel Kawar dress collection – are mixed in with contemporary clothing sometimes borrowed from participants in Kiswanson’s performances. In this particular piece, a tracksuit is overlaid with an 18th century Jordanian Robe.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

If one had been guessing at Takeshi Murata’s criticism of American consumerist culture up until watching Infinite Doors , it would be solidified after hearing the announcer from The Price is Right squawk prizes one after the next. In the two minutes of the film’s runtime, can count the word “new” used twenty-eight times, and “car”—the holy grail of prizes on that show—used eight times. The bodacious women introduce free prizes, the doors slide open repeatedly, and the crowd cheers with an insatiable appetite in a clear signal of an American propensity for numbing overconsumption.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Telescopic Pole is an adjustable telescopic pole that extends vertically from floor to ceiling and is held up by its own internal pressure. The ends, protected by two, cut-open tennis balls, recall the legs of a walker. For Rantanen’s second solo exhibition at Jancar Jones Gallery, San Francisco in 2010, one pole was placed inside the gallery while the other was located outside.

Photography (Photography)

Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris.

Photography (Photography)

Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris.

Photography (Photography)

Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami. From left to right, each bill is progressively folded up, step by step, into the shape of a gun. Both a scream and a whisper are capable of conveying the same content, if at drastically different decibels, the artist proposes.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Raphaël Zarka discovered the scientific manuscripts of Abraham Sharp while in Oxford. Sharp was an English 18th century astronomer whose treatise Geometry Improved became the subject of a new body of photographs and sculptures. In this document, Sharp draws infinite possible combinations that enable the making of a polyhedron from a wooden cube – the most complex figure allows a perfect form with 120 facets.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Watching the films of Omer Fast confounds our expectations of the medium. 5,000 Feet Is the Best, 2011, is presented like a conventional big-budget Hollywood movie and has similarly high production values. Yet Fast frustrates the narrative element that Hollywood teaches us to expect: While stories unfold, repetitions and obscurities challenge the idea of a central controlling account.

Photography (Photography)

Jackie and Chloe by Carolyn Drake is from a series of works titled Knit Club . For this project, Drake collaborated with an enigmatic group of women in Mississippi who loosely call themselves “Knit Club”. There is a strangeness to this photograph; details of facial identity are withheld.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights. The protesters and their supporters carried signs and wore t-shirts whose messages are highlighted in the drawings. However, in them, Bowers isolates the images of the protesters from the multitude that surrounds them in the original photographs, and, therefore amplifies their messages.

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

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.

Photography (Photography)

Chalis Katesi Ramaula is a series of 240 prints capturing Nagendra Gurung’s life, work, and colleagues from the construction sites where he has worked in Dubai and Saudi Arabia. When seen together, the sequence appears to have a cinematic temporality, as one feels the passing of the years he has endured as a migrant worker. Gurung’s subjectivity is highly present, even when looking at the most banal scenes of cranes, concrete, and other machinery, which are rapidly transforming the landscape and society of the Gulf into its own version of capitalist futurism built through the exploitation of others.

Installation (Installation)

Recollections of Long Lost Memories by Ahmad Fuad Osman is a series of 71 black and white sepia-toned archival photographs that chart, with nostalgia, the social encounters between hierarchies of life in the Malay world. It begins with British colonial rule in the mid 1800s, followed by its occupation by Japanese forces in the 1940s, the rise of Communism in the 1950s, and then the racial issues between Islamic, Chinese, and Indonesian populations in a multicultural country desiring political independence in the 1960 and 70s. The archival photographs in this series were gleaned from national archives, museums, libraries, and old books across Malaysia.

Photography (Photography)

For the last few years, Che Onejoon has been focusing on the relationships between African countries and North Korea. He has attempted to interpret the ongoing Cold War in the Korean peninsula from a new geopolitical perspective. His resulting body of work focuses on the memorial monuments, statues and architectures that were built in 13 different African countries by North Korean government.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints. Though simple, each contains a nested stack of historical and self-referential quotations. Both black-and-white prints depict a version of Ligon’s 1988 painting, Untitled (I Am A Man) , which declares the words of the parenthetical in blocky black letters.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Data mining is a computer software process that can involve the neutral or benign analyzing of internet data for patterns, however, it can also imply the more sinister activities of surveillance or subject-based information gathering. Amy Balkin’s neon sculpture I (heart) Data Mining , takes on this issue by revealing the acronyms or abbreviations of both technology companies and government bodies that have either profited from data mining, or have used it to political ends. The culprits include Facebook, Investigative Data Warehouse, Apple Computer, The Department of Homeland Security, Narus, Target, and Twitter.