Painting (Painting)

Zbigniew Rogalski territory extends from painting to photography. Here , the artist turned his attention towards the photographic qualities in painting and towards the pictorialism found in photography . As the artist mentions on his website,” this work is about flying and the experiences connected with it – the person floats under the ceiling like a balloon, being hunched in a position recommended during an emergency landing”.

Installation (Installation)

Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall. With its cushions removed to reveal its internal mechanisms, the chair’s programmed rubbing, kneading, patting, and vibrating motions create a strange sight and soundscape. The work explores the relationship between flesh and machine as they come together through technologically simulated social behaviors, challenging normative ideas about human interaction.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Flesh in Stone – Ghost No. 1 is a stunning series of cement made body parts in various scales and movements, along with components such as iron and plaster molds to emphasize their tension. The “incompleteness” of Flesh in Stone weakens the figurative image itself, thus shifting the viewer’s focus onto the relationship between the rough material and the ideal rounded body shapes.

NFT (NFT)

For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history. Kurant’s fictional mineral-currency is at once data visualization, a sly commentary on global markets, and a speculative narrative about the connection between technology and geology (for example ‘conflict minerals’ used in smartphones). Inspired by the way natural forces shape rocks, landscape, and planets over time, Sentimentite ’s evolving forms are shaped by dynamic social and political ruptures in the 21st century.

In line with Hernández’s interest in catastrophe, Vulnerabilia (choques) is a collection of images of shipwrecks and Vulnerabilia (naufragios) collects scenes of car crashes. The artist has said that the appropriation of popular imagery is a way for him to take pictures without a camera and to register the things that happen in the everyday as visual essays that evidence the fragility of the world.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The figure in Armless tapers away. Muscular legs turned upright spin down into a disintegrating torso. Lines, that in another drawing would sketch out contours and volume, here seem to be strands of flesh.

Installation (Installation)

This triptych is based on a Tesla whose interior the artist customized on the Tesla website. The width of the work when the panels are closed is the exact width of a Tesla, thus one designed to hold two bodies side by side. In Mexico City the car is used as a social space and, for young people, one not controlled by parents.

Installation (Installation)

Dave is part of Mohamed Bourouissa’s project Horse Day , which stemmed from a residency the artist conducted in Philadelphia in 2014. There, he discovered the activities of the Fletcher Street Riding Club, a historical stable and training program built by and aimed at young African Americans. Weaving together two predominant symbols of American lifestyle and culture—the cowboy and the car—Bourouissa collaborated with local riders and artists to organize a contest celebrating the best adorned horse, in the manner of car tuning competitions.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

From among a cloud of fake smoke we see a heavily pregnant Cohen wearing a bikini and golden stilettos with lace-up straps wrapped around her legs, grasping onto the frame of a modified car as its loud hydraulic system clumsily moves it up and down. Pregnant with her first child at the time of the shooting of this video, the car featured in Hydroforce is an aging East German Trabant that the artist transformed into an American El Camino lowrider over the course of a decade, and which features in several of her works. Challenging the politics of the idealized and sexualized female body and the stylized car, Hydroforce establishes a metaphorical connection with her own identity: as a woman, a mother, laborer, and a migrant.

Photography (Photography)

In Jackass (2008) by Ari Marcopoulos, his two sons, Cairo and Ethan, are pictured relaxing in a disheveled bedroom in their Sonoma home. One plays with some sort of board game while the other holds either a book or DVD of the movie Jackass Number Two, presumably the source of the photograph’s title. As Marcopoulos has continued to document his sons, and as they have become teenagers, the images of them begin to closely resemble the teenagers in much of his earlier work.

Photography (Photography)

A photograph of a tin box full of marijuana simply titled Green Box, speaks to the constantly changing status of the substance–once taboo or illicit, now a symbol of a growing industry in Northern California. In the past a photograph of marijuana would more likely be found in an evidence file than an art museum or gallery, but today continued debates about the legality of marijuana and the industry surrounding it has brought the substance into common public view. Green Box is a strong example of the current sociopolitical state of California and the grey areas that exist in legislature and at the same time illustrates the unavoidable commercialization of once underground cultures.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Plane is an inflatable sculpture in the shape of an aeroplane made from numerous pieces of plastic bags assembled by an iron. The object is inflated by a fan at the structures base and deflates when it is deprived of its power source, causing the plane to sink. It is in this process that plane leans on its wings, evoking a crash, a defeat, or a failure.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Employing both the High Modernist technique of abstraction and monochronism, as in the work of Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein, and bodily states of fetishization, Yea High (sweetpreparator) reworks the art historical canon of movement and the body to consider flesh as a physical construction of man-made matter. In the work, the artist uses perspiration as a medium on the surface, combing the man-made and the organic. The pink of the surface reflects the artist’s interest in reframing the way we understand the permeability of human skin.

Photography (Photography)

“I focused on how the political and physical merged” analyzes Willie Doherty. Out of the Shadows II plunges us into a dark night lit by a few street lights in a deserted street where a car is parked in the Irish city of Derry. What is at stake is yet to be unearthed.

Photography (Photography)

The photographic work Lowrider Builder and Child is a companion piece to the video Hydroforce , which features Cohen in the late stage of her pregnancy posing atop a German car that she transformed into a lowrider in a period of ten years. While in Hydroforce we see the artist pregnant, Lowrider Builder and Child features the artist’s newborn by her side. In the image, the positioning of Cohen’s body, together with the tranquil, idyllic nature of the site in which she reclines to breastfeed her baby — with the gentle light gleaming as it bounces off the hood of her car — is a nod to classical reclining nude paintings, which invariably portray female subjects.

Painting (Painting)

Made in cast bronze, Two Eyes Two Mouths provokes a strong sense of fleshiness as if manipulated by the hand of the artist pushing her fingers into wet clay or plaster to create gouges that represent eyes, mouths and the female reproductive organ. Equally, there is a semblance of fruits—their succulence and fragility. While the work is sensual, the matte bronze surface refuses any expectation of softness.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video work Volga by Aslan Goisum begins with a sweeping field caught under a misty, gray sky. In the center of the frame is a white car of the eponymous Soviet make—standard-issue for the imperial administrative class during the USSR’s ‘Period of Stagnation.’ The vehicle is the only indication of cultural geography in the video; what unfolds must be somewhere in the former USSR. In a slow crescendo of activity and tension, small groups of men, women, and children, walk up to the car and squeeze into it.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pay and Display is a film of a performance, for which there was no audience, staged in the multistory Pershore Street car park in Birmingham, a brutalist building, arguably one of the most inhospitable environments for a musical performance. Dilapidated and empty, the ghostly presence of the car park comes to life. Beer composed the piece to resonate with this architecture, finding the frequencies that would bring the building to life, acting as a sound box and in effect another voice.

Glaze (Savana) (2005) is an assemblage of found materials: a car wheel, a tire, and a wooden plinth of the type traditionally used to display sculpture. It directly engages with the readymade, a subject that Alexandre de Cunha takes up throughout his practice, often inflecting it with a tropical, and South American–inspired materiality and painterly style that could potentially come across as a stereotype. Here, da Cunha transforms the component parts into a composition that highlights often-overlooked materials of artistic production and cultural mass-production.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This work was filmed on the shores of Jelly Bowl beach in Carpinteria, California, after Jennifer West was taken by the sight of a coastal family home owned by surfer Andy Perry. After conversing with Perry, spending time in the site, and engaging with several other locals, West wanted to produce a film that documented this idyllic Californian lifestyle and that embodied the sense of joy, warmth and nostalgia that multiple generations of surfers and their families had shared in this site. In the footage we see a couple of silhouettes wrapped up in blankets as they watch their beloved ones surfing at dawn—including surfers Andy Perry, and siblings Makela, Alana and Zach Moore.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Domes #1 represents a significant moment in Chicago’s career when her art began to change from a New York-influenced Abstract Expressionist style to one that reflected the pop-inflected art being made in Los Angeles. By 1968, the year she began creating Domes , the twenty-nine-year-old artist had moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, graduated from UCLA, and was part of a generation of artists whose work was characterized by of the masculine overtones of Southern California’s flourishing car culture. Inspired by new technologies in the auto manufacturing, these “Finish Fetish” artists appropriated industrial materials such as car paint or lacquer to create artwork with pristine finishes.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Anne Samat’s Puteri 3 references Ulek Mayang, a classical Malay dance, performed in a ritualistic pre-Islamic context. It is based on the myth of a princess from the sea who steals the soul of a fisherman she falls in love with, leaving his body lifeless. A battle ensues for the soul of the fisherman, between a shaman (bomoh) trying to bring back the spirit into the earthly flesh and the princess aided by five of her sisters.

Photography (Photography)

In her 2003 series “Better Lives”, Sue Williamson explores stories of immigrants in search of a better life in a historically contentious South Africa. In an attempt to address and confront xenophobia in South African history, Better Lives series subverts racism and prejudice by emphasizing the immigrant as human, and thus gives the subjects a voice. “Better Lives: Richard Belalufu” tells a tale of surviving in a hostile South Africa through the undercurrent reflections on violence, abuse and the difficulty of finding home as an immigrant.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the film Hustle in Hand (2014) we observe secret negotiations carried out between two characters with only their torsos visible in the frame— negotiations that consider fetishizations, meaning and symbolic value of the body and flesh. Money, food, appearances, and consumption: the viewer is pulled into a round of transactions, a rumination on our society in which art occupies a coveted position. The film’s rhythm is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a green polyhedron that, once licked by one of the mysterious protagonists, becomes golden yellow, a magical event accompanied by an intense swelling of violin music.

Installation (Installation)

Mandy El Sayegh grew up in a medicalized environment, surrounded by anatomy, biology and psychology publications; these books inspire the figures that appear throughout her work. The work White Grounds 12 offers a bird’s eye view of a skull open from the front, belonging to a patient diagnosed with dementia who is suffering from self-inflicted wounds. White Grounds 10 depicts the body of an injured worker in China.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The film installation Mud Man by Chikako Yamashiro is set on Okinawa and South Korea’s Jeju Islands, two locations at the center of local controversies surrounding the presence of the United States military. Japanese and Korean languages are mixed (a combination of unclear Japanese — Uchinaaguchi , fragments and mumbles in Korean and onomatopoeic sound effects to complement the narration), and the landscape of the two islands (Okinawa and Jeju Island) juxtaposed. The film tells the story of a community visited by bird droppings that resemble clumps of mud falling from the sky.

NFT (NFT)

For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history. Kurant’s fictional mineral-currency is at once data visualization, a sly commentary on global markets, and a speculative narrative about the connection between technology and geology (for example ‘conflict minerals’ used in smartphones). Inspired by the way natural forces shape rocks, landscape, and planets over time, Sentimentite ’s evolving forms are shaped by dynamic social and political ruptures in the 21st century.

NFT (NFT)

For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history. Kurant’s fictional mineral-currency is at once data visualization, a sly commentary on global markets, and a speculative narrative about the connection between technology and geology (for example ‘conflict minerals’ used in smartphones). Inspired by the way natural forces shape rocks, landscape, and planets over time, Sentimentite ’s evolving forms are shaped by dynamic social and political ruptures in the 21st century.

Photography (Photography)

Sam Contis’s photographs explore the relationship of bodies to landscape, and the shifting nature of gender identity and expression. Oil is part of a photographic series Contis made at Deep Springs College, one of the United States’s last all-male institutions of higher learning, located in a remote desert valley on the California–Nevada border. Oil features a hand in front of an open hood of a car, checking the oil.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Bodily Study of Unthinking Groups, Harrison combines two disparate materials into one stratified stack: automotive clay (used in detailing cars) forms the earthy base, while fragments of zebra skull become imbedded in this falsified soil. Harrison’s forged archeological artifact compresses two cultural contexts together: that of Africa, represented by the bleached zebra skull; and that of Detroit, the birthplace of the American car. Detroit’s Matthew Angelo Harrison works at the intersection of sculpture and technology, building his own 3D printers (which rise to the status of sculpture), and using these creations to formulate others.