Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Uncertain Pilgrimage is an ongoing project in which Moore draws from his unplanned travels in recent years. Many of the pieces are found objects and discarded materials that he has transformed into tools and eccentric prop-like sculptures to help him on his journeys. Map (from Uncertain Pilgrimage) is one such object that could be a metaphor for the whole project: a simple empty paper map that has no location written on it.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series. It’s contrasting dark and vibrant tones presage his later series of works, exhibited at L. A.’s Hammer Museum as Scorched Earth. These larger works share a map-like quality, looking like aerial views of some scarred urban landscape.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself. In homage to an influence in his early career, McCarthy attempted to reconstruct a pair of pants worn by Black Panther revolutionary Eldridge Cleaver in a picture that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s. But in the process, McCarthy misremembered their original design of the pants, which had black outer panels and white inner panels in white, and left a black shape highlighted in the crotch area.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The theme of the end of the world, of the last man on earth, recurs in our literary and cinematographic culture and in our imaginary: “we had this dream before, the dream that we’re alone.” In The Secret Life of Things , the narrator presents himself as an enthusiast and expert on films announcing the end of the world and those staging someone waking up to discover that they are the only survivor on earth. Like in some works by Mario Garcia Torres (like The Transparencies of the Non-Act , a slide projection about the artist Oscar Neuestern, Kadist Collection), the artist lends his discourse to a stranger. Mastering the montage, he intersperses a monologue and images.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Turtle Walk is a video installation that documents two performers carrying large white disks on their backs as they walk through the urban environment of Seoul. The simple disks disrupt normal social behaviors in urban space, acting like parabolic antennae that cause the performers to interact and communicate unusually with their surroundings. The performance causes viewers to reflect on their expectations for normal behaviors within the social space of the city.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The three cut-outs are made of three aerial photographs coming from the archives of the Ecuadorian Military Geographic Institute. These are views of the Amazon forest. The photographs are cut following an optical illusion pattern called “reversible cubes” or “tumbling blocks”, based on the Necker cube, a multistable object of psychophysics that is constantly switching perspectives.

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.

Installation (Installation)

In the mid-1990s, Belli started to create soft sculptures that allowed her to reconnect with manual labor and sewing learned from her seamstress mother. Using recycled fabrics and objects collected from friends and second-hand stores in Nicaragua, Belli’s work explored the codification of family space—using dolls, tables, tablecloths, and curtains—making tangible how masculine authority is inscribed onto women’s bodies daily. Produced during her time as an MFA student at the San Francisco Art Institute, Diálogo is part of a group of sculptures that addresses the tension between restriction and agency, imprisonment and liberation, and ultimately, the possibilities and limits of human action in a society with deeply eroded democratic structures.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Shot on 35mm in two simply framed shots, Jazmín López’s Juego Vivo captures children at play, mixing imagination, reality, innocence, and violence. Set within a lush, green forest, we see first several children come into the frame, walking towards us, as a disembodied voice counts off “Tres…cuatro…cinco…” A game of hide and seek is at hand, and sounds of the girl counting are met with scattering children. In the first shot, while everyone else disperses, one boy advances steadily toward the camera, holding a scavenged stick in his hands, wielding it like a gun.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Bodily Study of Unthinking Groups, Harrison combines two disparate materials into one stratified stack: automotive clay (used in detailing cars) forms the earthy base, while fragments of zebra skull become imbedded in this falsified soil. Harrison’s forged archeological artifact compresses two cultural contexts together: that of Africa, represented by the bleached zebra skull; and that of Detroit, the birthplace of the American car. Detroit’s Matthew Angelo Harrison works at the intersection of sculpture and technology, building his own 3D printers (which rise to the status of sculpture), and using these creations to formulate others.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Hole’s Journey by Ghita Skali follows a complex political satire involving a worn-out floor, a political activist, and the Ouled Sbita tribe of Morocco. For 23 years, the director’s chair at an international art institute in the Netherland’s scratched the wooden floor below it. For Skali’s project, a 102 cm x 120 cm section of this scratched floor was cut out and mailed to an expropriated region in Morocco.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Silver & Gold combines video, performance, and original costumes into a self-proclaimed “filmformance” that evokes the legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his tribute to 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez in a magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race, glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen. Taking Smith’s interest in Hollywood’s obsession with the reproduction of the exotic as a point of departure, Bustamante embodies Miss Montez. Here, video and the body function as both material and subject in her bizarre search for the new bejeweled body part that is at once her curse and oracle.

Photography (Photography)

San Pedro is a seaside city, part of the Los Angeles Harbor, sitting on the edge of a channel. California Stories: Attempt to correlate social class with elevation above main harbor channel (San Pedro, July 1975) (1973–2011) is a series of coupled gelatin silver prints that show the artist using his hand to measure the elevation of various pieces of real estate, ranging from a manicured mansion to a ramshackle beach house. A direct equation becomes evident between the social strata these homes represent and the height at which the artist holds his hand.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Leonardogillesfleur describe Action 3:02 as their “first New York blizzard storm at about 5am. The photographic moment of a photo album which could have been taken by anybody in any familiar situation with the intention to immortalize that moment.”

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Of Action 26:15 leonardogillesfleur notes: “There is almost an ice-cream store in every corner of Buenos Aires. The family [in the video] is having an ice-cream in the hot summer afternoon. Small tics appear on people’s faces from a fly or the attempt to hold still while the ice-cream top melts or drops off its sugar-cone.”

Painting (Painting)

In Seven Deadly Sins (2006), Shen utilizes abstraction to produce complex topographies of color that evoke associations with violently tumultuous landscapes. Streaks of blue and burgundy paint scatter across a peach colored silk backdrop, dripping into rough floral and botanical forms. At once both diffuse and dense, Shen’s compositions feel both expansive and contained, the colors overlaid atop another with a seemingly free spontaneity that belies more ordered and considered deliberation.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Leonardogillesfleur describes Myself as a Fountain : “The couple kissing in the park. Pedestrian pass by with boom box, fire truck sirens and baseball-bat sounds suggest they are in New York. But the kiss is not accomplished and saliva drips from the lover’s open mouth like a fountain of unfulfilled desire.”

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)

To make his series Shadows (1980), Gaines subjected 20 potted plants to a uniform procedure. Each is pictured four times: a photograph of the plant, a photograph of its shadow, a drawing of the plant, and a drawing of its shadow. Instead of lending structure to disparate entities, this system serves a counterintuitive purpose, dissolving the object.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

The Wooden People is a 360º virtual reality film series comprising seven episodes. It is written and directed by artist Nao Bustamante and its cast includes notable Los Angeles-based artists Gabriela Ruiz, rafa esparza, San Cha, Markus Kuiland-Nazario, Ron Athey, and Dorian Wood. The work also features a musical and sound score by Nick Hallett and costumes by OLIMA.

Photography (Photography)

In his composition, Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk, Lassry’s subjects are mirrored in their surroundings (both figuratively, through the chocolate colored backdrop and the brown frame; and literally, in the milky white, polished surface of the table), as the artist plays with color, shape, and the conventions of representational art both within and outside of the photographic tradition. Elad Lassry explores how visual languages are constructed across multiple disciplines and media. His larger body of work responds to the relationship between artistic mediums and their forms, and his prints question familiar modes of viewership and our continuous desire to find and identify clear narratives in photographs.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Montemozolo writes of the work: “ Fireflies is the result of a sudden event—and its transformation/translation into an art work—that erupts within a life, altering its flow, suspending it, creating a momentary intensity and deviation of the flow, channeling it somewhere unexpected. This unforeseen deviation is dissected in terms of affects in the time frame of 5 minutes. The affects that emerge in the piece are characterized by a sense of movement between pain and hope, and a work of association between cancer and expectancy.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This score is a graphic record of the detailed choreography of one of Anthony McCall’s Landscape for Fire performances. These took place between 1972-74 in the UK at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, Colchester School of Art, in Reading and in North Weald as well as in Sweden at Fylkingen Society of Contemporary Music and Arts, Stockholm, and in the USA at the William Patterson University, Wayne, New Jersey. Many of these events were photographed by David Kilburn and Carolee Schneemann, only one in 1972 was filmed.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

By Way of Revolution is a series that addresses the inherited histories of protest that inform contemporary social movements. In the project Metaferia works intrinsically with female descendants of prominent historical black activists to produce video art; with women of color organizations to produce socially engaged work; with “radicalism” archives and performance stills to produce works on paper and tapestries; and with museum, gallery, and public spaces to produce participatory performances. Tapestry (Gewel) is one of a series of tapestries that are all subtitled with names of traditional storytellers from across the African continent.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Ballad of Special Ops Cody by Michael Rakowitz is a serio-comic stop motion animated film in which an everyday African-American G. I. character, personified through an action figure that comes to life. The protagonist breaks into Chicago’s Oriental Institute to “liberate” Mesopotamian votive statues, who are likewise animated through voice-over narration, from their imprisonment in the museum’s vitrines. This set-up allows for meditations on various war and colonial histories; as a barbed twist on the Bush-era rhetoric of promoting “democracy” in the Middle East through regime change, the G. I. cannot understand why the statues wish to remain in the museum and not return to their (currently war torn) “homelands”.

Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films. Indeed rather surprisingly Kim seems to have had a huge collection of Western videos and he published a book called “On the art of the Cinema” in 1973. As the final acknowledgments indicate, Garcia Torres’s work was produced following in depth research, consulting information given by director Shin Sang-ok who has been kidnapped by Kim in 1978, as well as Jerrold Post (The George Washington University) and Timothy Savage (Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

By Way of Revolution is a series of works by Helina Metaferia that addresses the inherited histories of protest that inform contemporary social movements. In the project, Metaferia works intrinsically with female descendants of prominent historical black activists to produce video art; with women of color organizations to produce socially engaged work; with “radicalism” archives and performance stills to produce works on paper and tapestries; and with museum, gallery, and public spaces to produce participatory performances. Tapestry (Gewel) (2023) is one of a series of tapestries that are all subtitled with names of traditional storytellers from across the African continent.

Photography (Photography)

The photographed plaster heads set against the idyllic landscapes of the south of England, subvert the process of image production and memory. Based on photographic sources from journalism, they have preserved a ‘memento mori’ in the intimate form of a sculpture, yet derived from a source which is not only public but also voyeuristic. They have been entirely dislocated from their original context, and transferred to the realm of photography again, into fragile silver gelatin prints.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The work La Loge Harlem focuses on the history of Harlem and its development over the last 200 years. It was a playground for the rich in the 19th century and where Old New York had its summer homes and diversions. The center image is a portrait of the artist’s grandmother when she was 16 in 1949.