Film & Video (Film & Video)

On the first day of the Covid-19 lockdown in New York, Andrew Norman Wilson was evicted from his sublet and decided to board a $30 flight to Los Angeles that evening. From a cottage that faces the Hollywood sign, he began to dwell on an encounter he had with a woman driving alongside him on the highway, emphatically singing along to the song he was listening to through the same radio station. That song was Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” For Wilson, the uncanny synchronicity of this encounter with a stranger tuned into the same frequency resonated with the inspiration for Phil’s song, which he first heard as a teenager while getting high in a friend’s basement.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Vertical Horizon by Wito Wibowo addresses a media scandal in 2010 that took over the cultural milieu of Indonesia. Someone uploaded on a sextape of pop star Ariel Peterpan with model-actress Luna Maya recorded on a mobile phone. Several days later, another video of Ariel Peterpan and Cut Tari, an infotainment news presenter in Indonesia, surfaced on the Internet.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Yu Honglei’s video and mixed media works riff on familiar motifs from the Western art historical canon and reimagine them through a playful but subversive culture jamming of their original meaning. Life (2013), for example, depicts a tiled backdrop of various images and stills associated with the work of American Pop artist Andy Warhol. Digital reproductions of his silkscreens featuring public figures like Elizabeth Taylor, Chairman Mao, and Debbie Harry form an amalgamation of modern art iconography, while repeated images of Warhol himself serve as a constant reminder that even after his death, the artist is still decidedly present in our art historical consciousness.

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)

The two large-scale stereoscopic photographs in That’s That’s Alright Alright Mama Mama depict a recreation of Elvis Presley’s recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee. This study in doubles is underscored by its title, which repeats and doubles Elvis’s original song title. The images are hung in a specially angled wall and the viewers are provided special 3-D glasses in order to contemplate the image.

Photography (Photography)

In Eniko Mihalik (2012), the camera captures a glimpse of the eponymous Hungarian model as seen through a rearview mirror. They are both two examples of the artist’s many enigmatic photographs of models, actors, musicians, and other powerful figures rooted in the celebrity-driven culture of Los Angeles. Catching a glimpse of the model, the viewer enters into the world of the celebrity.

Photography (Photography)

Negligee (2013) serves as an example of this tension, with its artful angle and play with shadow and light upon the sensual subject, rendering the image ambiguous. Like much of Burton’s work, Negligee reflects both his experience as a commercial photographer and his interest in the voyeurism, desire, vulnerability, and power of the photographic act.