Photography (Photography)

Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series, Detroit Photos , which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures. Continuing his fascination with failed modernist utopias, Douglas depicts Michigan Central Station as a monolithic, almost prison-like structure lording over a desolate landscape. Once the hub of industrial transportation, the station is now devoid of any human activity and lies fallow, surrounded by train-less tracks and vegetation-less ground.

Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world. Patches of canvas cover parts of this otherwise representational photograph and ask the viewer to consider the role that editing and play in our perception of the urban landscape and modernity.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action. Also characteristic of his work, the scene takes place in front of a mirror, suggesting the kind of personal self-reflection that one is capable of – both good and evil. The video makes clear cinematographic reference to the ‘alter-ego’ transformation in Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and to the “You looking at me?” sequence performed in front of a mirror by Robert De Niro in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver which also inspired Gordon’s through a looking glass ( 1999).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle. As suggested by the work’s title, each of the hands assumes a character with a distinct personality, as if we were witnessing a lovers’ quarrel and embrace, or the embodiment of opposing forces of an internal struggle. Gordon has previously created performance-based works depicting his own body or parts of it—arms, hands, fingers, eyes—usually enacting simple, repetitive movements.

Photography (Photography)

Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner. An emptiness (some are burned letting appear a white or mirror background or a mirror) replaces the eyes, giving the impression of a blind eye deprived of all expression. Paradoxically, the work looks at us all the more intensely.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The three Maiko s were included in Ron Terada’s 2008 exhibition, Voight–Kampf , at Catriona Jeffries gallery. More ambitious in size and subject matter, this show with its complex video installation marked a new path for Terada’s work. Voight-Kampf is based on a scene from Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner in which a giant advertising billboard in the midst of a dystopian city of Los Angeles in the future displays a geisha eating candy.

Photography (Photography)

Palo Enceba’o is a project by José Castrellón composed of three photographs, two drawings on metal, and a video work that creates a visual and cultural analogy between the events of January 9th, 1964 in Panama City and the game of palo encebado carried out in certain parts of Panama to celebrate the (US-backed) independence from Colombia. In the game, young men climb a wood post smeared with animal wax to collect a Panamanian flag in return for a bounty. During what is now remembered as Martyrs’ Day, Panamanian students trespassed the fence that separated the American-governed strip of land along the Panama Canal and Panama City to fly a flag and symbolically claim sovereignty over the area that had been turned over to the United States by the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty in 1903.

Photography (Photography)

Palo Enceba’o is a project by José Castrellón composed of three photographs, two drawings on metal, and a video work that creates a visual and cultural analogy between the events of January 9th, 1964 in Panama City and the game of palo encebado carried out in certain parts of Panama to celebrate the (US-backed) independence from Colombia. In the game, young men climb a wood post smeared with animal wax to collect a Panamanian flag in return for a bounty. During what is now remembered as Martyrs’ Day, Panamanian students trespassed the fence that separated the American-governed strip of land along the Panama Canal and Panama City to fly a flag and symbolically claim sovereignty over the area that had been turned over to the United States by the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty in 1903.

Photography (Photography)

Palo Enceba’o is a project by José Castrellón composed of three photographs, two drawings on metal, and a video work that creates a visual and cultural analogy between the events of January 9th, 1964 in Panama City and the game of palo encebado carried out in certain parts of Panama to celebrate the (US-backed) independence from Colombia. In the game, young men climb a wood post smeared with animal wax to collect a Panamanian flag in return for a bounty. During what is now remembered as Martyrs’ Day, Panamanian students trespassed the fence that separated the American-governed strip of land along the Panama Canal and Panama City to fly a flag and symbolically claim sovereignty over the area that had been turned over to the United States by the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty in 1903.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Anne Imhof’s video work Untitled (Wave) creates resonances between the feminine, adoration, and immateriality, while also referring to the history of art and aesthetics, in particular the concept of the sublime. Starring Imhof’s partner and collaborator Eliza Douglas, the film depicts a woman, naked from the waist up, dressed simply in tracksuit trousers, long black hair, feet dipped in the ocean water. The woman bears a long whip, while she looks out at the horizon and the waves lick at her bare feet.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Emmanuel van der Auwera visited Miami at the end of 2017 and was working on a project relating to school shootings. Two months later, on 14 February 2018, 19 year old Nicolas Cruz killed 17 people and injured 17 others in a shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Van de Auwera began to follow videos uploaded to the Periscope App, a live broadcasting channel that closed in March 2021, downloading them and creating a bank of data that would otherwise disappear, as material on Periscope was self-deleting after a short period of time.

Installation (Installation)

You have given the world your songs by Francisca Benítez is a poem in American Sign Language (ASL). It employs ten handshapes arranged in a numbering sequence from 1 to 10. This visual rhyme sequence is standard in Deaf poetry, as is the Tenth in Latin American popular oral/written poetry traditions.

Photography (Photography)

Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California. The photograph is framed upside down; these “inverted trees” follow Graham’s early experiments with the camera lucida, a room-size pinhole camera that dates back to ancient times. Through these works Graham looks back at the history of photography while making the viewer aware of his or her own retinal experience.

Photography (Photography)

Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California. The photograph is framed upside down; these “inverted trees” follow Graham’s early experiments with the camera lucida, a room-sized pinhole camera that dates back to ancient times and which he has used to photograph trees from various regions. Through these works Graham looks back at the history of photography while making the viewers aware of their own retinal experience.

Installation (Installation)

Open Casket IX is an installation by Indira Allegra that combines traditional materials of memorial—tombstones, mausoleums, and caskets—with contemporary expressions of grief. The work is a memorial for people who have lost loved ones to police violence. It is part of Allegra’s Open Casket series, which is concerned with the need to recognize grieving as a collective responsibility, rather than an individual misfortune to be shouldered by one affected person or family.

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.