Sculpture (Sculpture)

Makeover

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and riffing on the “I Want You” army recruitment campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, Labat asked Bay Area residents to interpret the slogan and make their own demands of the public in a series of live performance auditions. Given one minute to seize the voice of authority, contestants were asked to be the finger-pointing Uncle Sam, and their performances—as on the TV program American Idol —were voted on by a live audience. Five winners were chosen and their image and slogans appeared on posters throughout San Francisco to coincide with the presidential elections.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Continuing Oursler’s broader exploration of the moving image, Absentia is one of three micro-scale installations that incorporate small objects and tiny video projections within a miniature active proscenium. Mounted on platforms suspended in space on metal stands, the video sculpture contemplates human relationships, expressed here by shouts and murmurs, the strange and the familiar.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tony Cokes’s long-form, multi-channel work Some Munich Moments 1937–1972 forms a layered montage of historical and contemporary source material exploring different periods of Munich’s history. Incorporating footage and speeches from the infamous 1937 exhibitions, Degenerate Art and First Great German Art Exhibition , views of the city’s destruction from June 1945, and texts on Otl Aicher’s graphic identity for the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972, the film weaves together an open-ended narrative. This visual and textual material is set to music including techno playlists, contemporary EDM tracks, and Donna Summer’s disco classic, I Feel Love (1977), which the American singer recorded in Munich’s legendary Musicland studio.

Installation (Installation)

Future Gestalt re-imagines a large-scale sculpture “ Smoke” by Tony Smith as embodying a futuristic intelligence that communicates with a group of communitarians undergoing experimental psychotherapy. Future Gestalt is not a video of a performance, rather, it is a documentation of the last of four unscripted sessions of guided participation led by the artist. Through the title and form, the sessions suggest Gestalt therapy, promoted as a form of personal transformation in California at the Esalen Institute.

Photography (Photography)

Erin Shirreff’s A. P. series of prints investigates how objects are “constructed” at the level of the image. For each composite photograph, Shirreff fabricates two sculptural forms from what appear to be metal or plaster, although the precise materials are unidentified. Her sculptures resemble miniature architectural models or renderings of buildings as-yet-to-be fully conceptualized, both elemental and elegant in their use of sharp angles and clean lines.

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.