Painting (Painting)

For Richard Bell, art is not simply a vehicle through which to represent and convey political content. On one hand, art itself has an activist charge—in its very form and presence it can shake up conventional or assumed understandings, opinions, and behaviours. But on the other hand, it is deeply implicated in the actions and attitudes associated with colonialism in Australia and abroad.

Photography (Photography)

Washington D. C. Constitution Ave. is a silver gelatin print from the series American Surveillance , a ten-year-long project where Richard Gordon photographed surveillance cameras across USA. In the image, a woman and a child walk along Constitutional Avenue as a surveillance camera on the street post directs its gaze towards them. The otherwise quiet image then becomes an exercise of resistance: together with the other images from the series, Gordon’s photograph documents the changes that have taken place in architecture, civic life, especially in a post 9/11 experience of public space.

Photography (Photography)

San Francisco, Moscone Center is a silver gelatin print from the series American Surveillance , a ten-year-long project where Richard Gordon photographed surveillance cameras across USA. In the image’s foreground we see the silhouette of a man, darkened and in contrast to the bright streetscape unfolding behind him. To the left, an American flag flutters in the wind, saluting the skyscrapers—among them the iconic architecture of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Long Long Live (2013) takes the viewer to the setting of the Oasis Villa on Green Island, once a reform and re-education prison to house political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period. In black and white, Yao depicts the historical site as an eerie abandoned compound. Reflecting on the centenary of the HsinHai Revolution and the end of the Cold War, Yao questions the existence of an ever lasting dynasty or “transcendental Rules of History.” The soundtrack features a sole voice reverberating through loud speakers.

Photography (Photography)

The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources. Growing up in an African-American community in Los Angeles, Capistran has long been influenced by hip-hop culture. The photographs in this print document him surreptitiously breakdancing on Carl Andre’s iconic lead floor piece after the guards at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have left the gallery.

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.

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.

Photography (Photography)

Mohamed Bourouissa’s “ Shoplifters” Series was created in 2014-2015, in a neighborhood supermarket in Lefferts Garden, Brooklyn. The store manager used to take and display Polaroids of thieves caught in the act. In the tradition of appropriation artists –from Marcel Duchamp to Richard Prince– Bourouissa simply reproduced these photographs and transposed them into the field of art to foster questioning.

Textile (Textile)

Cosmic Tautology I and II are two textile pieces representative of Santiago Borja’s practice and long-standing interest in disrupting universalist assumptions of minimalism by connecting them with other, non-Western or esoteric references. They were hand-woven in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico, and are composed of nine squares, the middle one left unwoven. Their composition is based on Red Square, White Letters (1962) by Sol Lewit, but they also take cues from works like Black Series II by Frank Stella.

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

A child and dreamer my whole life long (broken tree) (2004) is a sculpture made of filler, wire, copper, oil paint, and wood depicting a tree just at it’s moment of breaking into half – one part alive with foliage and blooming branches and the other the crisp of the break exposed, with the trunk adhered solidly to a plinth. The sculpture appears to speak quite bluntly about Isaac’s own sense of bleak pessimism when exposing a severed tree, the universe’s sacred sign of life and birth. Through the perfect rendering of this encapsulated moment, Isaacs demonstrates the strength of the sculptural artifact and his interest in failure and fragility.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Making Fantasies animates scenes based upon photographs by Nan Goldin, Larry Sultan, Richard Billingham, Yasuyoshi Chiba and famous photojournalism images such as Jeff Widener’s photograph of Tiananmen Square and Kevin Carter’s photograph of a Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture. By fabricating narrative and aesthetic connections between the images on three channels, Pei-Shih questions the objectivity and truth telling of photography.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat. In 2006, it was included in the exhibition, Alchemy of Comedy…Stupid at Artpace in San Antonio where Arceneaux explored the links between the medieval practice of alchemy and contemporary comedy. However, his particular image of the wheelchair is tragic, since it refers specifically to the comedian Richard Pryor, who became temporarily wheelchair-bound after being severely burned from drug use, and died prematurely of a heart attack in 2005.

Photography (Photography)

Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon. Designed by the architect Richard Neutra, its gray glass, white expanses, and simple forms exude austerity. Luisa Lambri’s photograph Untitled (Sten-Frenke House #04) (2007)recalls the unembellished elegance of the structure while also alluding to modernist painting; the image is less a picture than an abstract expanse that conveys its own flatness.

Painting (Painting)

Both Head-Portrait with Red and Blue Background and Man with Blue Tie are classic examples of Weeks’ deftness of line, shape, and color. These two works illustrate his signature flattened style -a vast departure from figurative painting of the time- and hints of influence from modernist painters like Henri Matisse and Maynard Dixon, although with a somewhat darker tone. Both figures stare with with expressionless faces and hollow eyes.

Installation (Installation)

Composed of two rectilinear pieces of glass, this work is part of a series of sculptures started in 2006. These transparent assemblages are in contact with the walls and floor of the exhibition space. The sculptures of this series are the same dimensions with different combinations.

Painting (Painting)

Both Head-Portrait with Red and Blue Background and Man with Blue Tie are classic examples of Weeks’ deftness of line, shape, and color. These two works illustrate his signature flattened style -a vast departure from figurative painting of the time- and hints of influence from modernist painters like Henri Matisse and Maynard Dixon, although with a somewhat darker tone. Both figures stare with with expressionless faces and hollow eyes.

Photography (Photography)

In his work Housing Dreams Walls , the houses photographed are from a closely-knit locale in Kerala – a significant and rapidly popular pattern in this part of the country. The pattern of richly colored and aggressively decorated residences symbolizes prosperity and exudes a sense of security – both financial and social. Although the vocabulary of aesthetics can be termed kitsch, the idea is to understand the underlying expression in the ostentatiously and vibrantly decorated households and giving them some sense of individuality, reflecting their owners’ personalities.

Photography (Photography)

Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California. Commissioned by industrialist J. Irwin Miller and his wife Xenia Simons Miller, and built by Richard Neutra in 1937, the Miller house’s open and flowing layout expands upon modernist architectural traditions. It features a flat roof, stone and glass walls, with rooms configured beneath a grid pattern of skylights and supporting cruciform steel columns.

Painting (Painting)

White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form. Here, Capistran humorously remixes the form and style of Frank Stella’s Black Paintings with California punk rock band Black Flag’s song title and logo (created by artist Raymond Pettibon). White Minority , then, appropriates, recontextualizes, and riffs on language and visual signs to unmoor notions of identity, power, and revolution.

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The Antique Gem is a collage by Jess comprised of eight fantastical scenes featuring the Cupid as its central protagonist. The title of the work and the oval shape of these scenes, refer to ancient engraved gems, a form of fine art dating back thousands of years B. C. Underneath each of the scenes we can also see lines from a poem, which the artist cut out of the book Gems: Selected from the Antique — a 1804 publication by British painter and illustrator Richard Dagley that is considered an important document for the study of engraved gems and a historical artifact itself. The original poem, as Dagley explains in the publication, is an ancient Greek epigram by Aulus Licinius Archias found engraved in a sardonyx (a variety of rock-forming mineral) gem depicting the figure of Cupid curbing a lion.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Bassoonist

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.

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.

Installation (Installation)

This work emphasises Kitty Kraus’s involvement with process, with alchemical transformations associated with Post-Minimalist aesthetics, Arte Povera, Joseph Beuys and Robert Smithson. The loss of form or its dissolution is at the heart of the series of lamps encapsulated in blocs of ice with liquid progressively spreading on the floor. The bulb is embedded in the ice.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Violinist

Film & Video (Film & Video)

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace takes its title from a 1967 poem by American writer Richard Brautigan, which describes a utopian future where computers are in harmony with and protective of mankind and nature, performing all the necessary work while we retreat back towards nature. In Sisto’s work, a computer generated voice recites Brautigan’s poem while a series of digitally rendered 3D objects with a sleek, mirrored finish, float weightlessly across the screen. Sisto’s work also shares its title with the 2011 BBC documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis, which has the view that computers have failed in their task of liberating humanity and have instead created a simplified and distorted world around us.