Arpedia

Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos. When it comes her turn to “perform,” Bornstein displays mundane and disposable—but elaborately archived or framed—consumer objects such as coffee lids, plastic straws, candy wrappers, and product labels. Through the medium of public broadcasting, then, she makes visual the frequently overlooked but massive cultural penetration of advertising, and its proliferation of “throwaway culture” via images.

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Untitled (Zimbabwe)

Fred Wilson

Painting (Painting)

Fred Wilson’s flag paintings document the 20th century history of African people, indexing the period of liberation from colonialism. As the majority of African flags were created during the 1950s and 60s, they were intended to reflect a so-called ‘modern’ aesthetic and ideology. Many African flags maintain the typical flag tropes such as stripes, stars, birds, and blocks of primary and secondary colors; green to represent the land; blue to symbolize the ocean or sky; and red to recall the violence that occured in the pursuit of liberty.

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2016 in Museums, Moneys, and Politics

Andrea Fraser

The year 2016 is organized like a telephone book; the data corresponding to the contributions are classified in alphabetical order by the name of the donor. With this database as well as other types of information, the 900-page book presents a material representation of the scale of the cross over between cultural philanthropy and the financing of political campaigns in America. It also provides an unprecedented resource for discovering the political leaning of the museum sector.

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NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, Mastic Beach, New York, United States

Trevor Paglen

NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, Mastic Beach, New York, United States

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Itch

Yang Guangnan

Itch explores the relationship between technology and daily human experience with a motorized arm that extends from within the gallery’s wall, moving up and down while holding a projector that shows a desperately scratching pair of hands.

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Action No.1

Yang Guangnan

Installation (Installation)

In Action no. 1 Yang Guangnan reflects on the interiority and exteriority of human-technological experience with mechanical gestures that are semi-human and semi-machine. A hanged shirt mounted upon the artist’s machine rhythmically bounces and rotates in a way that suggests a skeletal interior.

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Wagon Wheel

Toby Ziegler

Wagon Wheel is a work with a fundamental dynamism that derives both from the rotating movement of the elements suspended on poles and the kicking of the legs of the figure. It is based on a pornographic image by Giulio Romano (ca.1499-1546). Romano had completed Raphael’s frescos in the Vatican after the latter’s death but was not paid for the work.

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Untitled (Sten-Frenke House #04)

Luisa Lambri

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.

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Undocumented Intervention

Julio Cesar Morales

Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation. Morales drew inspiration from both his childhood near the United States-Mexico border as well as from photographic documentation on U. S. government websites.

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A Thoughtful Gift

Pio Abad

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.

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Gerald Hughes, a.k.a. Savage Fantasy’; about 25 years old

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

For this series, Philip-Lorca diCorcia walked along Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles in search of models who would be prepared to pose in hotel rooms according to pre- planned scenarios. The artist explained that: “I went back to the street just like the ordinary clients of these prostitutes. I went up to them and mentioned the following: ‘I would like to take a photo of you, I will pay you exactly what you are paid for a pass’”.

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The American War

Harrell Fletcher

The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history. The project began in 2005 when Fletcher visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. He was shocked by images that depicted the lasting effects of the war and the atrocities committed by the United States.

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Destilaciones

Ximena Garrido Lecca

Destilaciones ( Distillations , 2014) is an installation composed of a group of ceramic pots, presented on the floor and within a steel structure. Copper pipes run through the perforated ceramics, evoking the design of an oil purifier. The work is a direct reference to the history of the Peruvian coastal town of Lobitos.

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Our love is like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours

Martin Boyce

Installation (Installation)

In the installation Our Love is like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours, Martin Boyce uses common elements from public gardens – trees, benches, trashbins– in a game which describes at once a social space and an abstract dream space. The trees, unique sources of light in the exhibition space, produce their own environment. These sculptures, as if extracted from a set, are enough to suggest an atmosphere, a landscape, or a movie.

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Untitled (Waiters dancing with Itinerants, Onomatopoeia)

Charles Avery

Since 2005, Charles Avery has devoted his practice to the perpetual description of a fictional island. Replete with its own population and constantly shifting topography, Avery’s intricately conceived project amounts to an ever-expanding body of drawings, sculptures, installations and texts which evince the island. Exhibited incrementally these heterogeneous elements serve as terms within the unifying structure of the island – as multiple emissions of an imaginary state, and as a meditation on the central themes of philosophy and the problems of art-making.

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SpringValle_ber_girls

Petra Cortright

In the flash animation SpringValle_ber_girls , Petra Cortright collages together surreal scenes out of unnaturally idyllic desktop screensavers with equally unreal computer-generated women that pop in and out of the landscape. Cortright’s backgrounds are made seedy by the appearance of digitally-rendered strippers, while various layers of internet escapism collide together in an infinite loop. The dancing girls are sourced from VirtuaGirl, a software that makes footage of strippers available for download.

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Sickhands

Petra Cortright

In her 2011 webcam video, Sickhands , Cortright poses before her in-computer camera, as her hands, hair, and body begin waving and rippling vertically across the screen, distorted by software effects. Capitalizing and commenting on the ubiquity of homemade video, the short film replicates with banal proximity the amateur special effects that thrive on the web. This rather cliched visual trick recalls a funhouse mirror, or, perhaps more aligned with Cortright’s frame of reference, a dream-sequence cue from after-school 90s television.

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Map, 1969-2005

Peter Friedl

Map 1969-2005, a poster glued on the wall, questions space in its relation to geography. On a red background, a free-hand drawing in white refers to the aesthetics of maps. Map 1969-2005 is not an accurate map of the United States, but one that combines mapping, overlaps and merges diverse elements: Oregon, Lake Superior, San Francisco, Cheyenne, Missouri, Zuni, Navajo, Texas, Shawee, Colorado, Piegan, Canada, Miami, etc.

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Sketches from train ride Chicago to San Francisco

Lam Tung Pang

Lam Tung Pang created Sketches from train ride Chicago to San Francisco during his travels through the United States researching American curatorial strategies for representing traditional Chinese painting in museums and cultural institutions. The drawings incorporate both traditional and contemporary Chinese landscape techniques to reflect on the memory, history, and aesthetic practices of the Chinese laborers who played a prominent role in the American westward expansion. By representing the Western landscape according to Chinese aesthetics, Lam calls attention to the distortions and cultural specificity of American representations of the Western landscape and non-Western cultures.

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There are veins in these lands, I

Rodney McMillian

Painting (Painting)

In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point. Calling up the unknown intimacies of these objects, McMillian upends their usual orientation, placing them directly on the wall to serve as paintings, rather than covers. Layering over the repurposed textiles with hardware store paint, McMillian transforms the sheets into canvases, creating abstract landscapes on top of the traces of human bodies intact in the fabric.

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Untitled 3737 and Untitled 5157

Todd Hido

The two pieces in the Kadist Collection depict foggy landscapes, one at dawn, the other at nighttime. Both dimly lit scenes are dominated by an eerie feeling. Taken by a road, these painterly photographs suggest the uncanny character of the transient.

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Minimal Secret

Voluspa Jarpa

To make Minimal Secret (2012), Jarpa created sculptures based on pages of declassified CIA information about the United States’ involvement in Chile. The cutouts in the acrylic represent the content that was blacked out when the pages were released to the public. For Jarpa, that so much content from these documents was deleted before declassification is symptomatic of hysterical behavior, which, in Freudian psychoanalysis, results from the inability to deal with trauma.

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Central Region

Tanatchai Bandasak

Central Region by Tanatchai Bandasak is a meditation on materiality and time-based media centres on the mysterious, prehistoric ‘standing stones’ of Hintang in Northern Laos: little-studied megaliths which have survived thousands of years of political change and the cataclysmic carpet-bombing of Laos by the United States during the Cold War. In Bandasak’s unpretentious, animist portrait of the ruins, what is remarkable is the absence of the embodied observer, instead, it is the technical parsing of the digital video camera that enlivens these prodigiously still, mute and enduring objects, through a chanceless sequence of static shots, dissolving measure and revealing gradual modulations of light. The piece evokes a spectral landscape energised by the undead and the nonhuman, opening up contemporary philosophical questions via seemingly ageless and inert artifacts.

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Game (Six Pieces)

Erbossyn Meldibekov

Game (Six Pieces) by Erbossyn Meldibekov is inspired by the popular Rubik’s cube puzzle and is composed of three colors (red, green and white) instead of six, referencing the colors of the Afghan flag. The work provides a revisionist interpretation of the legacy of The Great Game (the original 19th-century standoff between Russian and British empires over Afghanistan), and Afghanistan’s position as a centerpiece of the longstanding War on Terror, (the military campaign led by the United States and their allies against organizations and regimes they identified as terrorists after 9/11). Game (Six Pieces) mobilizes dark humor and irony to illustrate the complex and unstable relationships between communism, Islam, and American and British imperialism.

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Raybrook

Jesse Krimes

Raybrook by Jesse Krimes takes its name from The Federal Correctional Institution, Ray Brook (FCI Ray Brook), a medium-security United States federal prison for male inmates located in Essex County, NY. In addition to its indexical title, this quilt-work tapestry is made from personal clothing and other like articles the artist was given by currently, and formerly incarcerated persons. It is part of a larger series of works called the Elegy Quilts , which illustrate domestic scenes inspired by conversations the artist has had with the individuals these fabrics were acquired from.

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Hercules Engines, Abandoned, Canton, Ohio

William E. Jones

In the early 20th century, the Hercules Engine Company was doing a brisk business producing customized, heavy-duty engines. Seventy years later, when the United States military started opting for Humvees and stock parts, the company began to fail, and it entirely ceased production in 1999. Hercules Engines, Abandoned, Canton, Ohio (2011) depicts the manufacturer’s former productive core, gone fallow.

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Paper Tigers…from a whisper to a scream

Juan Capistran