Painting (Painting)

Taken from the title of the incredibly influential punk/hardcore record I AGAINST I by the Bad Brains, Untitled (blue) is an acrylic painting on reflective paper by Chris Duncan is part of a larger body of work titled EYE AGAINST I . This title references Duncan’s early artistic influences from the punk and hardcore music communities in tandem with his conceptual interest in perception and optics. This small painting features a glowing cluster of colorful dots on a bright blue background, also created from an accumulation of blue dots in varying tones.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

16 films is a selection of David Haxton’s single-screen videos, which he began producing in the 1970s as a continuation of some of the conceptual underpinnings of his earlier film installations. As the described by Haxton, “[he] became interested in in examining the nature of the medium [of film] including light, movement, and the formation of a three-dimensional illusion of space in a flat surface.” This selection of films were produced in 16mm film between 1970 and 1982 and have been digitally mastered in high definition from the original 16mm films, which are preserved by the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles. Reminiscent of the paired back, low-fi quality of other conceptual video work from that period, Haxton abides to a certain criteria to restrict aspects of the medium: he does not do any editing, always fixes the camera onto a single position for the whole duration of the films, and he limits the actions of the performers.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Edith Dekyndt looks at the waters of the Dead Sea, that become almost an abstract undersea landscape. The exceptional physical qualities of this salt water make this an unusual study: depth, weightlessness floating, where the presence of salt eradicates any possible life form. Dekyndt films the emptiness and the supposed absence in this sea, in which we can, however, notice an immense richness of movements and colors due to light variations of light.

Photography (Photography)

In the mid to late 70s David Haxton turned to photography, and similarly to his output in film, his photographs show reverberations of his perspective as a painter. As inferred from the title—and the titles of most of his work—Haxton has a methodical, near-scientific approach to studying and documenting the effects of light. In Holes in White and Holes in Cream with?

Painting (Painting)

Lens Flare and the series Untitled Basel Lens Flare (6168, 5950, 7497) were part of a solo project by the artist presented at ArtBasel in 2009. Included in the Kadist Collection, these works continue to explore the ontology of the image to investigate the relationship between painting, photography, and a new time-based variable: film. Reduced here to the essential function of recording the exposure of light through the apparatus of a lens, Kantor then translated these film stills into painted colored canvases that retain the 3:4 aspect ratio of the 16mm film as well as the exact size of the projected image.

Photography (Photography)

Yosuke Takeda gives the viewer brightly colored views, each of which he has searched out and patiently waited for. He gives light a density in the precise moments he captures—a forest’s leaves shimmering in the early morning, a street’s reflective surface radiating color at night, luminous blinds drawn over an apartment window. He achieves his distinctive effects by using an old, second hand analog-era lens that he attaches to his digital camera.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The film Line Describing a Cone was made in 1973 and it was projected for the first time at Fylkingen (Stockholm) on 30 August of the same year. This piece, which was initially screened in independent film contexts, it soon began to be shown at art museums and ended up becoming one of the key works of the artistic movement that opened up the visual arts towards cinema. With a duration of 30 minutes, the film shows the creation of a white curve being projected onto an empty space.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Landscape for fire is a major work by Anthony McCall. The film recounts a performance where characters in white, light up fires in a very orchestrated choreography of lights in a vast flat landscape. The performance is carefully planned – the fires are lit and geometrically aligned in a precise temporal progression.

Photography (Photography)

Barbara Kasten’s Studio Construct 51 depicts an abstract still life: a greyscale photograph of clear translucent panes assembled into geometric forms, the hard lines of their edges converging and bisecting at various points. Light streams from unseen sources and projects rectangular shadows against an adjacent wall. Three-dimensional shapes become suddenly flat as the objects in Kasten’s still life are juxtaposed alongside their ghostly traces.

Photography (Photography)

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