Sculpture (Sculpture)

Untitled (rolled up) , is an abstract portrait of Owen Monk, the artist’s father and features an aluminum ring of 56.6 cm in diameter measuring 1.77 cm in circumference, the size of his father. Jonathan Monk bridges a conceptual art and his family privacy, and ironically ensures that there is “no difference between Sol Lewitt and my mother, he does not know more than she do not know. ” What is the status of the O-backed chair rail to the white cube?

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Meeting #100 is one in a series of text works by Jonathan Monk. In this series, the artist attempts to organize meetings somewhere in the world. The audience is given the details of a meeting—the place, date and time—and nothing more.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Happy Birthday

Sculpture (Sculpture)

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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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Tapitapultas (2012), Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker comment on mass consumerism and pollution by way of a game they invented. The artists used disposable spoons as catapults to shoot thousands of plastic bottle caps at a hole in a concrete platform. The platform was once part of a U. S. military installation in the Panama Canal Zone, and it is now an observation deck in a nature park.

Installation (Installation)

NO POSITIONS AVAILABLE is composed of panels covering the entire wall of the gallery exemplifying one of the tendencies of the artist. The “billboard sign,” like a ready-made, plays with the different meanings of the title, literally and abstractly. The repetition of the sign, as it has used in Minimal and Conceptual art, fills the space.

This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat. The flames surround him eroding the extremity of the bat. The delicate sculpture refers to the sacrifice of the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, who immolated himself on June 16th 1963, in reaction to the discrimination and the repressive politics of the Diem Catholic regime (regime installed by the Americans) towards the Buddhists.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ciprian Muresan asked a group of protagonists to wear a monk’s robe and copy a certain number of artworks and texts from exhibition catalogues. Here it is no longer the Bible that is reproduced but works by Malevich, Mondrian, Beuys, Duchamp. These artists represent a certain form of utopia in art and are themselves quasi-mythical figures.

Installation (Installation)

Mo(nu)ment / (…) / mem(y)orial (2011) is one of the artist’s first artworks after his retreat as a monk. This artwork is at once an exhibition configuration and an attempt to formalize a reflection. Composed of elementary geometric objects, Mo(nu)ment / (…) / mem(y)orial , refers to different sharing and transmitting media systems, which are illustrated here in a closed book, a fan, loose sheets of paper, or a box filled with gold powder.

Photography (Photography)

The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture. In the background, the steel pillars creates a division of space implying a separation the two men according to their geographic regions of origin or residence, their vocations, their ethnicities, and their attitudes toward war. Yet, the mirrored body language of the two characters also suggests their reconciliation into a dialogue perhaps characterized by the protagonists’ physical and spiritual conversation.

Painting (Painting)

On the artwork, Rommel states: “I was reading Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Purity, where they take a lot of walks through the jungle in Uruguay, or Paraguay, I can’t remember. One of the characters takes a walk and jumps off a cliff; it’s kind of dark. The painting reminded me of a long, dark, and very serious walks in beautiful places.” With references to Howard Hodgkin in the incorporation of the stretcher into the painting and certain kinds of mark making, to Matisse’s cut outs and to the history of Cubist collage, Rommel has created a dreamy oeuvre that manifests her strong conceptual interest in process and unmapped journeys.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Acting Exercise: Demon Possession is a video by Miljohn Ruperto that addresses notions of performativity, the self, and collective truth. Set in an empty, derelict room with nothing but an old mattress on the floor, the film features a series of actors independently performing a demonic possession, or at least their interpretation of what one would look like. Although each reenactment is slightly different, actor after actor, the viewer is confronted with a common thread: a near archetypal response that binds them all together.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Miljohn Ruperto’s research-based multidisciplinary practice often deals with possession, re-enactment, mythology and archives. These conceptual throughlines also underpin Ruperto and Minnesota-based director Rini Yun Keagy’s eerie experimental documentary Ordinal (SW/NE) , which collapses mythology, scientific research, Californian agricultural history, American literature, and speculative fiction into a poetic and timely examination of possession, infection, and individual agency in an age of wanton industrial agriculture and alienation. Ordinal (SW/NE) tells the tale of a young Black man named Josiah as he navigates the banalities of daily life while potentially being possessed by a malignant supernatural force or stricken by valley fever, a little-known yet gruesome and sometimes lethal real-life respiratory illness which disproportionately affects farm and field workers, particularly Filipinos and African-Americans.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Miljohn Ruperto’s high-definition video Janus takes its name from the two-faced Roman god of duality and transitions, of beginnings and endings, gates and doorways. He is usually depicted with two faces as he looks both forward and backward, to the future and the past. The video, which is deftly animated in collaboration with Aimée de Jongh, presents a close-up of a dying “duck-rabbit,” a vivified version of an ambiguous illustration made popular by the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations .

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Miljohn Ruperto’s silent video work Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper is an archive of ghosts. The video’s title figure, a Filipina actress, vaudeville dancer and singer who played racialized, peripheral roles in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, flits in and out of a montage of scenes. Ruperto digitally modified the 16mm film by blurring the background and all of the figures in each scene except for Cooper herself.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Gozo Yoshimasu’s double-sided work on paper Fire Embroidery explores his response to the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. He embarked on the project out of a deep sense of sympathy and commitment, in pursuit of “poetry possible after March 2011”, without exactly knowing where he was heading. He started scribing lines and letters on exceptionally large manuscript paper that he handcrafted every day.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Gozo Yoshimasu’s visual-poetry series Dear Monster (Kaibutsu-kun) explores his response to the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. He embarked on the project out of a deep sense of sympathy and commitment, in pursuit of “poetry possible after March 2011”, without exactly knowing where he was heading. He started scribing lines and letters on exceptionally large manuscript paper that he handcrafted every day.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Gozo Yoshimasu’s visual-poetry series Dear Monster (Kaibutsu-kun) explores his response to the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. He embarked on the project out of a deep sense of sympathy and commitment, in pursuit of “poetry possible after March 2011”, without exactly knowing where he was heading. He started scribing lines and letters on exceptionally large manuscript paper that he handcrafted every day.

Painting (Painting)

In the “Black Paintings” series, although the human body is only suggested, it plays an important role. Some body parts are absent, mostly the faces which are usually an affirmation of the individual. The characters recall ghosts testifying as to the traumas of war.