Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Mullican’s Stick Figure Drawings depict characters reduced to their most basic graphic representation. Glen is a simple silhouette, genderless and inspired by a found photo of a crime scene, in whom we recognize the generic sign of the universal symbol of a self-portrait. Mullican continually projects himself, sometimes physically, into the silhouette that he has created, allowing the artist to pass from one reality to another.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Painting (Painting)

The triptych Black Star Press is part of the series ‘The Black Star Press project’ initiated in 2004 by the American artist Kelley Walker. The images in this series are taken from a photo essay on the struggle for civil rights in Alabama, directed by Charles Moore in 1962 (and published by the magazine ‘Life’) which showed the repression of the black population and persistent inequalities in the southern United States. The title “Black Star Press” is taken from the name of the news agency where Charles Moore worked, and it refers to the young black man shot fighting for the rights of his community.

Installation (Installation)

Matthew Buckingham presents a narrative directly connected with a highly symbolic site in the United States, the Mount Rushmore Memorial*. He elaborates a historiographic narrative of this place and switches it into the domain of science fiction by proposing a photograph of the Memorial as it should appear in 500 000 years. The effigies of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt become unrecognizable.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

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.

Painting (Painting)

In 2008, Grassie was invited by the Whitechapel Gallery to document the transformation of some of its spaces. The artist chose to depict the space before and after, thus creating the series titled “After the Archive Collections Room.” This group of paintings displays a space locked into time with its scaffolding and broom exposed, depicted just before an exhibition on a collection of archives.

Photography (Photography)

Ryan Gander is a collector. He keeps all sorts of documents to create from. His studio is full of found images, personal images, documents copied from internet or cutout of newspapers.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The work consists of a work inside a work. The spectator is presented with a commissioned documentary on a flat-screen Tv on the subject of the production of the making of an artwork that doesn’t exist entitled The magic and the meaning (2008). The imaginary film, The magic and the meaning , is described only within the documentary, which follows parts of the making of the film, extracts from interviews with the writer and film maker Dan Fox and the artist and maker of the work Ryan Gander; as well as showing short slow-motion sections of the film that does not exist.

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.

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.

Painting (Painting)

The Fifth Quarter might have taken its mysterious inspiration from the eponymous Stephen King story collated into the Nightmares & Dreamscapes collection. Various vanishing points and interior perspectives, like in another painting dated the same year called Continental Breakfast , create a complex matrix in which motifs, shadowy or geometric forms coexist to further confuse the map of this space. A disturbing yet alluring virtual reality composed of a medley of seemingly abstract designs is depicted through digital and painterly means.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Memorial for intersections #2 (2013) is a minimalist, black metallic structure that contains the brightly colored translucent circles, triangles, rectangles, and squares that originally were presented in Pica’s performance work A ? B ? C (2013).

Sculpture (Sculpture)

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.

Installation (Installation)

This work is meditative and fragile. These abstract forms are projected slides belonging to another lecture, Travelogue , where the images have been removed. What is left is the hole of the frame of the slide that light draws upon and projects on the wall.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“BC/AD” (Before Cancer, After Diagnoses) is a video of photographs of the artist’s face dating from early childhood to the month before he died, accompanied by the last diary entries he wrote from April 2004 to July 2005 (entitled “50 Reasons for Getting Out of Bed”), from the period from when he lost his voice, thinking he had laryngitis, through the moment he was diagnosed with lung cancer and the subsequent treatment that was ultimately, ineffective. The diary entries are at once poignant, ironic, laced with gallows of humor, with his continued eye for the little incidents in life, interweaving the past with his experience of the present. The morphing of the portraits—the eyes and sight remaining leveled—is haunting, beginning with very blurry images of childhood and ending with a pin-sharp photograph of Breakwell the month before he died.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Eclipse

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Untitled

Installation (Installation)

Work n. 335: THINGS

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Hako (2006) depicts a mysterious and dystopic landscape where the world becomes flat: distance between different spaces, depth of field and three-dimensional perceptions are canceled. Interiors of a Victorian doll’s house, a rippled seascape, a palm tree forest, and a gravel seashore are superimposed, morphing into each other. The hermetic narrative is charged with psychological and mythological aspects.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Beyond the White Walls , with a commentary written and spoken by Jeremy Deller, is often wryly amusing. The artist narrates the many projects he has completed or which are in progress beyond the gallery walls. It is beyond the gallery where Deller is at his most effective and where his art reaches out to and into people’s lives.

Installation (Installation)

A vehicle without light is a group of more personal photographs. This includes an image of a pirate radio in the 1960s, a story from the BBC website and the photo of Mary Aurore. Mary Aurore, is in fact a character he invented whose identity is impossible to determine but who appears in various works.

Photography (Photography)

This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005. His broad smile, on the verge of laughter, encourages reciprocity on behalf of the onlooker. This could be said to be a typical tactic in Creed’s work as it is so infused with humor and irony.

Painting (Painting)

The work of Keith Tyson is concerned with an interest in generative systems, and embraces the complexity and interconnectedness of existence. Philosophical problems such as the nature of causality, the roles of probability and design in human experience, and the limits and possibilities of human knowledge, animate much of his work. Language as a coded system, as a representation medium, but also as something that generates a whole variety of realities also plays a central role.