Photography (Photography)

San Pedro is a seaside city, part of the Los Angeles Harbor, sitting on the edge of a channel. California Stories: Attempt to correlate social class with elevation above main harbor channel (San Pedro, July 1975) (1973–2011) is a series of coupled gelatin silver prints that show the artist using his hand to measure the elevation of various pieces of real estate, ranging from a manicured mansion to a ramshackle beach house. A direct equation becomes evident between the social strata these homes represent and the height at which the artist holds his hand.

Installation (Installation)

Pedro Reyes’s Los Mutantes ( Mutants , 2012) is composed of 170 plates that combine characters from ancient and modern mythologies. As in a periodic table, animals and objects are combined with humans (male or female), providing a rational framework for the irrational products of human imagination. A Cartesian matrix such as this must follow certain rules.

Painting (Painting)

Machine Music (Embroidered Tank I)

Installation (Installation)

Adam Smith

Installation (Installation)

Karl Marx

In Reyes’s words, “We should be able to extract the technological nutrients before we excrete our waste. There is a missing organ in our social metabolism which would work as a stomach or intestines. The Recyclone is a device made of plastic containers that fit into each other.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Fashion is the focus of Blood Sugar , which consists of a video projected onto a vintage vinyl jacket set at torso height on a dressmaker’s dummy. As suggested by the work’s title, Cheryl Donegan uses the body as a metaphor, relating the continuous cycle and recycle of images that characterizes consumer fashion culture to the flow of sugar in our blood. Formally, the work borrows strategies from conceptual art, and specifically video art from the 1960s and 1970s—such as the use of repetition, patterns, found materials, and a DIY, low-tech aesthetic—and combines it with contemporary cultural forms, in this case, the world of fashion.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Planets, Chapter 32 (2017) is a short video that depicts the world at a time of great anxiety. However, it is done with a sharp sense of humor. It starts with a voice explaining that Africa will be partially inundated in the coming year, ending with the impossible relationship between the artist and a chatbot (primitive form of artificial intelligence).

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

All Nations are Created Special is a black and white woodcut print by the artist collective Pangrok Sulap. Emblazoned across this fantastical 10 metre long print is the Bahasa Malaysia phrase Semua Bangsa Tercipta Istimewa , which loosely translated means “All Races are Special”. Pangrok Sulap takes the translation one step further, as the title of the work declares “All Nations are Created Special”.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The installation work Men from Hyperion and Women from Phoebe (2011), for examples, features six guitars mounted on steel crossbar stands and connected to one another with slack wires. The electric guitars’ faceplates have been removed, revealing the built-in circuitry and electric pick-ups hidden under the surface. A DIY electronic circuit controls various sounds produced by the installation, while a pair of headphones allows participants encounter the work to engage on a different sensorial level.

Painting (Painting)

What Color is Luke Murphy’s outstanding digital painting that elegantly loops in nonstop motion. The artist cleverly usurped the familiar signage of brightly scrolling words that we ordinarily see calling out to advertise a Bodega or sidewalk cart’s fast food. In a DIY manner, Murphy constructed the extra-luminous LED panel screen and also wrote the code that sets the pace and pattern of the flowing words.

Painting (Painting)

Simon & Gus by Bobo is a binaural and fantastical artwork that tells the story of a sea steading maker-hobbyist as told from the perspective of an arduino board, and a mars dwelling stop motion animator as told from the perspective of a stop motion armature. The stop motion animator attends an artist residency on the red planet, and eventually sets out to start his own artist colony (a martian animation studio) with stupefying hubris. The result has disastrous consequences, with the martian ghosts eventually swallowing his soul, and his armature gaining full access to the animator’s motor skills and control of his ability to move.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

CAMARADERIE is a precursor to and a blueprint for Mahmoud Khaled’s later forays into queer aesthetics and modes of visual representation. This work is based on videos that the artist collected over the years through YouTube, of Egyptian professional bodybuilders exercising or rehearsing before posing in local and international competitions. The selection also includes videos of amateur young men from Cairo, who obsessively train and exhibit bodily transformations resulting from their admiration for those bodybuilders.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

RUINER III by Nikita Gale is part of an on-going numbered series of abstract sculptures in which various ancillary materials necessary for sound production and recording such as towels, foam, and audio cables, are riddled around piping resembling crowd control bollards, lighting trusses, and other like stage architecture. While these muscular works evoke the forms and dynamism of mid-century modernism, they can also be seen as a translation of Goethe’s idea that “architecture is frozen music”. RUINER III is exemplary of how the artist’s disembodied sets typically evoke a sense of longing through absence, and in so doing, draw out an extended mediation on how audiences project mental or emotional energy onto a person, object, or idea.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Ballad of the Unabomber Part I is a painting by Orion Shepherd that features several manila folders stacked in order according to their size, resting atop a grainy hardwood pattern. The painting refers to Theodore John Kaczynski, most commonly known as the Unabomber, and depicts the seemingly innocuous manila envelopes, which through his hands became fatal explosive weapons. Despite the deplorable actions that earned Kaczynski a life sentence, the manifesto that he demanded to be published has been regarded by many as a sane and highly intelligent work, correct in several of his ideas.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Ana Navas uses humor to address formal, aesthetic, and societal conventions that are interwoven in the everyday through the normalization of gendered behaviors and style choices used to project personal and collective signifiers. In her Donation Vases she uses quotes taken from corporate coach Lois P. Frankel’s book Nice girls (still) don’t get the corner office: Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers (2004). The aspirational, somewhat cynical tone of the sentences – “When given a choice, sit next to most powerful person, their power will cascade over you,” “Why is it that women buy those little chains to hang reading glasses around their necks,” “If you see your reflection on a glossy surface & notice something wrong, avoid fixing it there” – reveals a particular understanding of what a professional, ambitious cis woman should look like, the persona she should project, and the type of desirable behaviors that constitute a stereotypical “successful woman” according to a capitalist morality.

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.

Installation (Installation)

Spring Line is a piece shown for the first time in his solo exhibition at the Institut d’Art Contemporain in Villeurbanne in 2007. It pays homage to the work of the famous conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, who had died on 8 April that year. Scanlan aims to guide the spectator to gage the level of influence Sol LeWitt has had on his work with regards the conversion of potential ideas into sculpture.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Re: Looking marks a new phase in Wong’s work which connects his region’s history with other parts of the world. The video—located in an imagined contemporary Malaysian middle-class living room, a space of a fictive former imperial power—explores the precarious link between fact and fiction, fakery and authenticity by overlaying three believable, authoritative forms: a documentary, a website, and a realistic reconstruction of a contemporary home. It is rife with occidental colonial documents and exotic cultural artifacts—the trophy-evidence of Empire-making.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Eclipse is a series of screenprints from Jordan Kantor’s larger vitrine installation that included reworkings of a single image of a small group viewing an eclipse through shielding cut-outs. Printed on a clear surface, the work plays with ideas of obstruction and viewing, connecting spectacular natural phenomena with contemporary art making.