Arpedia

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Itch

Yang Guangnan

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.

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Justice

Zai Kuning

Justice (2014) presents viewers with a curious assemblage: a wooden gallows with slightly curved spindles protruding from the topmost plank, which in turn is covered with rudimentary netting, the threads slackly dangling like a loose spider’s web or an rib cage that’s been cracked open. A bundle of small red rattan balls hang from the front end of the plank, precariously knotted to a single thread hanging from the gallows’ edge. A book hangs from similar red threads at the plank’s rear, its surfaced wrapped multiple times over with the thread to hold it in place, the red thread resembling blood vessels or connective tissue.

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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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Somewhere Along the Black Sea in the Distant North-East, or in Libya in the Furthest South, The Amazons – The Woman and the Girls Children – Exist Just Outside of the Range of Normal Human Experience

Ellen Lesperance

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Converting

Zai Kuning

Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago. They were Christians and pagans that were often oppressed by the majority Muslims in the Riau community and were eventually forced to convert to Islam. Zai conveyed this history in Converting through the stark contrasts of red, white, black.

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Back to mother

Zai Kuning

Concerned with the early history of Singapore, Zai Kuning spent many years living with and researching the history of the Riau peoples who were the first inhabitants of Singapore. Inspired by the women of Riau, Back to Mother seemingly traces the central role of maternal figures in nourishing of Riau’s history as an early archipelago kingdom that was Hindu, Buddhist, and animist prior to 14th-century Muslim invasion. Organic materials such as beeswax form a layer of balm protecting threads of red paint symbolic bloodlines in a turtle-formed mandala—a primordial womb that recalls the Hindu and animistic origin of Singaporean society.

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Untitled (Pasta Painting)

Scott Reeder

Reeder’s works often start with language—and his Pasta Paintings are no different. After the phrase for the title came through his head, the artist set about trying to figure out how to make a mark with pasta. These paintings are the result, made using the pasta as something of a stencil, with the paint being applied after the noodles have been scattered on the painting’s blank surface.

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Espectacular cortina

Pia Camil

Camil has made numerous paintings and photographs of halted projects along Mexico’s highways (she calls them “highway follies”), and of abandoned billboards that look like theater curtains dramatizing failed capitalist strategies. (Espectacular, the colloquial Spanish term for “billboard,” also translates more literally as “spectacle,” and of course recalls Guy Debord’s famous 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle .) In Mexico, the urban landscape has been taken over by billboards; they are totally integrated into the landscape.

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Ben Deroy

Ben Shaffer

Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision. Often the artist works with the motifs of the counterculture and contemporary non-religious spiritualism. The figure hangs suspended—seemingly ascending—animation.

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Movement

Li Ming

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the eight-channel video installation Movement , Li Ming uses his body as a prop to interact with different means of transportation. Each channel features footage of the artist moving forward, jumping between various modes of transportation that weave in and out of the frame in a carefully orchestrated choreography. As the artist descends from the loader bucket of a moving construction tractor, he jumps onto a skateboard which he then discards as he lays on top of a suitcase that continues rolling forward.

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Hand Palm Echo 1

Christine Sun Kim

NFT (NFT)

Hand Palm Echo 1 is a digital animation based on Christine Sun Kim’s staircase mural at The Drawing Center in New York (10 March – 22 May, 2022). Sun produced this NFT from a still image of the animation that features a drawn notation of the sign “echo” in American Sign Language. Visually the black and white image depicts two side by side mounds, one labelled ‘Hand’ and the other labelled ‘Palm’.

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LAB

Kori Newkirk

Photography (Photography)

LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel. His photograph of this throwaway object calls back the body, and the handprint is in fact his own right hand; thus the piece can function as a self-portrait of the artist, in an ironic twist on the art historical genre.

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Kerosene Triptych

Natasha Wheat

Natasha Wheat’s Kerosene Triptych (2011) is composed of three images, one each from the digital files of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Field Museum tropical research archive. The original photographs were taken by anonymous photographers, not as art but as documents of the building of the Panama Canal. The laborers in the images are holding cans of kerosene and spraying it into the foliage.

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Deck Painting I

Alexandre da Cunha

His Deck Painting I recalls the simplistic stripes of conceptual artist Daniel Buren, or the minimal lines of twentieth century abstract painting, but is in reality a readymade, fashioned from repurposed fabric of deck chairs. Alexandre da Cunha reinvents found objects in surprising ways that combine the material characteristics of Arte Povera with the concerns and techniques of painting. Da Cunha’s work often features flags—either as a found material per se or as a constructed form—that reflect the artist’s interest in issues of nationality, governmental politics, allegiance, and culture.

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Telescopic Pole (Tennis Balls Red) and (Tennis Balls)

Chadwick Rantanen

Telescopic Pole is an adjustable telescopic pole that extends vertically from floor to ceiling and is held up by its own internal pressure. The ends, protected by two, cut-open tennis balls, recall the legs of a walker. For Rantanen’s second solo exhibition at Jancar Jones Gallery, San Francisco in 2010, one pole was placed inside the gallery while the other was located outside.

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Ropes

Sarah Conaway

Photography (Photography)

Ropes

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Arbol y Pelicao (Tree and Pelican)

Federico Herrero

Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape. Rooted in Central American folklore, politics, and culture, his works often move beyond the canvas onto the wall or into the streets. In Á rbol y Pelicao (Tree and Pelican, 2009), a tree with cartoonlike creatures drawn in pen beside it emerges from a field of bright swaths of color.

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Glaze (Savana)

Alexandre da Cunha

Glaze (Savana) (2005) is an assemblage of found materials: a car wheel, a tire, and a wooden plinth of the type traditionally used to display sculpture. It directly engages with the readymade, a subject that Alexandre de Cunha takes up throughout his practice, often inflecting it with a tropical, and South American–inspired materiality and painterly style that could potentially come across as a stereotype. Here, da Cunha transforms the component parts into a composition that highlights often-overlooked materials of artistic production and cultural mass-production.

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Laissez-Faire (Rainbow Flag)

Alexandre da Cunha

In Laissez-Faire (Rainbow Flag) da Cunha has turned a beach towel into both a painting and a flag. Where the printed surface of the towel originally served to enliven this commodity, here the pattern—now stretched and re-presented—suddenly refers to abstract painting’s promises of transcendence. And its crisply painted shape pulls the printed colors into the rectangularity of the canvas and, as da Cunha notes, the graphic iconicity of flags.

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Pianoiss . . . issmo (Worse Finish)

Christine Sun Kim

Pianoiss . . . issmo (Worse Finish)

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Be Oblivion, in Disconnect

Natasha Wheat

Installation (Installation)

Wheat’s work is built on a strong conceptual framework that weaves together commentary on social and political issues and the radical potential for change. Be Oblivion, in Disconnect (2011) is a sculpture and an intervention. Two cardboard boxes house white neon letters that collectively have the potential to spell “Be Oblivion.” The dismembered phrase is rendered powerless in its present state; the potential power lies with the viewer, who could conceivably reconstruct it.

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West (Flag 1) (Flag 3) (Flag 6)

Alexandre da Cunha

Photography (Photography)

The series West (Flag 1), West (Flag 3), and West (Flag 6) continues da Cunha’s ongoing exploration of the form’s various vertical, horizontal, and diagonal stripes. Here, da Cunha overlays thick bars of color (blue, green, and red) on photographs of the ocean at sunset with surfers in floating on the horizon. The solid colors contrast with the fading colors reflected in the sunset, and the tilted orientation suggests a familiar California beach scene.

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Casa de la cabeza (House of the head)

Bernardo Ortiz

Casa de la cabeza (2011) is a drawing of the words of the title, which translate literally into English as “house of the head.” Ortiz uses this humorous phrase to engage the idea of living in your head.

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Untitled

Mark Bradford