Photography (Photography)

Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012). In photographing seemingly mundane images of doorways and walls, Wiley collapses the viewer’s experience of inhabiting space by foregrounding features that we all too often miss in our built environment: the peeling white paint on a Corinthian column or the rusty studs on a blue door.

Photography (Photography)

Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012). In photographing seemingly mundane images of doorways and walls, Wiley collapses the viewer’s experience of inhabiting space by foregrounding features that we all too often miss in our built environment: the peeling white paint on a Corinthian column or the rusty studs on a blue door.

Painting (Painting)

Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building. Viewers unwittingly become voyeurs, peering through the rectangles that stand for windows and observing the residents therein, who ponder questions both mundane and existential: “Where is Ron now?” and “What have I become?” The queries and characters are treated democratically—not judged, praised, or subjected to hierarchy. While their thoughts are specific, the painting captures a universal urban activity: looking across to the building next door and wondering about its residents, all the while knowing that they have probably looked over and wondered about us, as well.

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.

Painting (Painting)

Chris Johanson’s Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat) (2010) pictures a canoe drifting toward an off-kilter horizon line, which demarcates the cobalt sea from the cerulean sky. An orange-haired figure, oar positioned in mid-stroke, looks ahead—whether toward an edge or an infinite expanse, it is impossible to tell. Echoing a trope that recurs in Greek epic poetry, transcendental painting, and current-day reality television, the character is alone with nature.

Painting (Painting)

Taken from the title of the incredibly influential punk/hardcore record I AGAINST I by the Bad Brains, Untitled (blue) is an acrylic painting on reflective paper by Chris Duncan is part of a larger body of work titled EYE AGAINST I . This title references Duncan’s early artistic influences from the punk and hardcore music communities in tandem with his conceptual interest in perception and optics. This small painting features a glowing cluster of colorful dots on a bright blue background, also created from an accumulation of blue dots in varying tones.

Painting (Painting)

Contrast to the bustling and unrelenting experience of a city such as Hong Kong, Chris Huen Sin Kan paints the tranquil interiors of his apartment, where he leads a modest and almost hermit-like life. He does not try to capture a particular moment, but rather the simultaneously changes that occur before him in time, exploring the nuances of light and reflections and recording movements in his apartment, his dog’s behavior and reactions, the way his plant change over time, all in an attempt to find a visual expression of his cognitive experience. Doodood and John are the names of his dog and the plant.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Untitled

Painting (Painting)

Untitled (Bubbles) by Natan Lawson is produced by a marker with a ball-bearing tip, which is drained and refilled with a new color of acrylic paint for each layer. Untitled (Bubbles) is the result of collaging layers of imagery in the computer, before sending coordinates to the plotter which renders it, with some manual intervention of the canvas. Lawson thinks of the process as related to a computerized jacquard loom, where colors are woven and layered.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

A Thoughtful Gift by Pio Abad is based on a version of a letter written by the former First Lady of the United States, Nancy Reagan to the former First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos. Written in 1986, the letter assures Marcos of their safety from persecution in the United States, following widespread anti-government protests across the Philippines. The Marcoses were granted exile in the United States by the Reagan administration and they eventually fled to Honolulu.

Photography (Photography)

Vision (Bump’n’Curl) by Dannielle Bowman is from a series of photographs titled What Had Happened . The series blends a major historical event with small, personal images. The photographs retain fragments of the artist’s own heritage and investigate the concept of home, while gaining inspiration from the Great Migration, a movement in which African Americans from the South (including Bowman’s grandparents) moved to the North, and also the American West from 1916-1970.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

As she traces the same shape again and again, Ojih Odutola’s lines become darker and deeper, sometimes pushed to the point where their blackness becomes luminous. Set against a blank white background, as in Untitled (2015), Ojih Odutola’s figures are stark, resolute in their darkness. The surface of her subject’s skin becomes ribbon-like, lines weaving across the contours of their head and neck.

Painting (Painting)

Ojih Odutola uses a distinctive visual style to capture members of her family, rendering them one pen stroke at a time, until their skin resembles ribbons woven into the contours of a face, neck, or hand. The simplicity of Ojih Odutola’s compositions enables a consideration of skin, blackness, surface, and detail, all hovering out of time and space.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

Mutant Garden Autobreeder by Harm van den Dorpel is a generative animated artwork based on evolutionary programming that never appears the same twice. The work is based on an existing algorithm called Cartesian Genetic Programming, invented by Julian F. Miller and Peter Thomson in 1997, the system itself having been finely tuned by van den Dorpel to produce a very particular quality of qualia. The software has been carefully constructed to produce a stream of new and unpredictable mutations that build and react to each previous generation of image.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In a society saturated by images, Eric Baudelaire is interested in political events that have not found their representation. For the film The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images, Baudelaire conducted research on 1970s Japanese cinema and more specifically on Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi’s filmography. In 1971, as the two legendary filmmakers of Japanese Nouvelle Vague were on their way home from a presentation at the Cannes festival, they stopped in Beirut, where their thinking concerning the image took the form of political activism.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Baudelaire’s latest film, Also known as Jihadi (2017) tells the story of a young French boy from Parisian suburbs and his assumed journey to the Al-Nusra front in Syria to join ISIS and fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Employing the cinematographic approach known as ‘landscape theory’ — or fûkeiron — developed out of Marxist film criticism in the 1970s where the landscape of a film is read as an expression of the political climate, thus becoming a significant character, motivation or reasoning for the films development. The 101-minute follows Abdel Aziz from the socially and politically rife milieu of the Parisian suburbs, weighted by division, segregation, development and poverty to, what the viewer assumes, Syria.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

With the war-torn Beirut cityscape as its backdrop—urban alleys, glistening beaches, abandoned buildings—Eric Baudelaire’s complex film, The Ugly One , unfolds in a time and place that vacillates among revolutionary narratives of the past, the fragile and ever-changing political situation of the present, and attempts to piece together the memories of those that live, or once lived, in the city. Conceived as a sequel to his documentary The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (2011), Baudelaire builds the structure of the film around a story told by Japanese New Wave film director Adachi, who also narrates the film. The plot line pivots around two lovers and former resistance fighters, Michel (played by Lebanese artist and actor Rabih Mroué) and Lili (Juliette Navis); their narratives fragment and reconfigure around the screenplay, which itself intertwines with Adachi’s own history, the act of making the film, and the self-conscious and sometimes improvisatory process of writing the script.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage. The surfboard, an emblem of Southern California, emblazoned with the image of an eight-ball, references numerous tropes and clichés of American popular culture, specifically subcultures related to pool halls, surfing, and beaches. Indeed, this model-scale surfboard may be a future pop-culture relic, referencing a particular surfer or era of board design.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Sara Cwynar’s composite photographs of found objects and images court feelings of time passing. Using studio sets, collage, and re-photography, she produces intricate tableaux that draw from magazine advertisements, postcards, or catalogs. Cwynar is interested in how design and popular images work on our psyches, in how their visual strategies infiltrate our consciousness.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage. Iron is one of nature’s most abundant metals. Smith, a philosopher of human detritus and poetic associations, presents it in this work as simultaneously everywhere yet paradoxically forgotten, lost in the heaps of refuse that fill junkyards and vacant lots.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Dora Garcia’s work is a result of institutional critique and more generally that of language, following the conceptual artists of the 1960s like Weiner and Kosuth and Fraser from the 1980s and 1990s. What a fucking wonderful audience (2008) is positioned conveniently at the crossroads of several trends identified in the work of the artist. The performance from which it is derived, was made at the Biennale of Sydney in 2008, taking the form of a guided tour at the Museum of Modern Art in Sydney and focuses on artworks that were not physically present.

Installation (Installation)

In Felicitas, we follow the converging routes of three characters: Felicitas, Michael and Andrew (the artist’s father-in-law who also features elsewhere). Felicitas is thedaughter of a German industrialist who immigrated to Rio after the Second World War. She is the one visible with a toucan in several images.

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 .

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Three hours west of New York City is the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. The story of this eastern ghost town’s demise has become legend: in 1962 burning trash ignited a vein of anthracite coal, starting an underground fire that continues to burn today, forcing the town’s depopulation. Centralia has since become a pilgrimage site; or rather a mile-long stretch of state route 61 outside of the town that sits abandoned, its surface buckled and cracked by the underground fire.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Known But to God: The Dug Up, Dissected, and Disposed for the Sake of Medicine by Doreen Lynnette Garner is a small, suspended sculpture composed of glass, silicone, steel, epoxy putty, pearls, Swarovski crystals, and whiskey. At once attractive and repulsive, the sculpture combines objects of adornment with what appears to be viscera. The sculpture’s curious delicacy evokes a ritualistic catharsis, in response to persistent forms of medical racial violence and objectification for Black people in America and around the world.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Indexes that either allow or inhibit the establishment of communication exist in both signed as well as spoken languages. Some differ radically depending on a variety of social, economic and geographical factors, while others are universally understood. Seemingly small and fleeting gestures can determine a sense of affiliation or a feeling of rejection.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video, the artist follows her grandmother, Aldona, during her daily walk through the Grutas Park in Lithuania. Founded ten years after the collapse of USSR, this privately-owned sculpture park features close to a hundred Soviet-era statues collected from all over the country. As similar statues were often taken down or destroyed in neighboring Soviet countries, the sculpture park became a unique yet controversial resource.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video animation Falling Head 2 , hand-painted by Diego Marcon in 2015, consists of a close-up of a head caught on the threshold between sleep and wakefulness or maybe from wakefulness to sleep. The film is projected as a ten-second loop where the first and last frames coincide. Working mainly in video and film, Marcon is familiar with the consequences of eyestrain.

Installation (Installation)

Named after a book that artist Shubigi Rao read growing up, The Yellow Scarf explores the history of the Thuggee cult in India in relation to the colonial British administration that ‘discovered’ but also ultimately exterminated this cult of assassins. The modern term ‘thug’ is said to be derived from Thuggee. Rao’s fascination with the Thuggee is interwoven with her parallel research into the strangler tree, found throughout South and Southeast Asia.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“ I think we are oversaturated, filled to the brim with images in our inner subconscious eye. Towards the end of 2020, I was feeling very much that I couldn’t take in any more information visually. That was when I made Instruments of Air.