“I focused on how the political and physical merged” analyzes Willie Doherty. Out of the Shadows II plunges us into a dark night lit by a few street lights in a deserted street where a car is parked in the Irish city of Derry. What is at stake is yet to be unearthed.
Eric Dizambourg’s film presents a bucolic and ludicrous world used as a background for a character who is an actor as well as a performer. This character comes and goes throughout the countryside, the barn and an urban setting, a world of odds and ends where objects often seem to be used for other purposes than their original ones.
Natura Negra , which translates to “Black Nature”, is a black-and-white photographic series by Chanell Stone that explores the connection between the Black body and nature within man-made environments. The series features a compilation of environmental portraits staged in urban “forests” that explore the notion of “holding space” within one’s immediate environment. Each image depicts an effort to reclaim and reconnect with the earth, even in spaces of compartmentalized nature like backyard gardens, flora intended as urban beautification, and lush public spaces.
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.
Set in the infamous Tenderloin district of San Francisco, Factotum of the City is a documentary film by Javid Soriano that delves into the life of a former world-class opera singer turned self-styled street hustler. Factotum of the City centers around Tim, a Juilliard School graduate who fell from the world opera stage into the bowels of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, an destitute place located amidst the city’s vibrant downtown. The film follows the opera man as he navigates the Tenderloin and its surrounding locales, allowing a glimpse into some of the bizarre, tragic, and comical situations he endures while living as a self-fashioned ‘Figaro’ of the street.
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.
Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building. Viewers unwittingly become voyeurs, peering through the rectangles that stand for windows and observing the residents therein, who ponder questions both mundane and existential: “Where is Ron now?” and “What have I become?” The queries and characters are treated democratically—not judged, praised, or subjected to hierarchy. While their thoughts are specific, the painting captures a universal urban activity: looking across to the building next door and wondering about its residents, all the while knowing that they have probably looked over and wondered about us, as well.
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.
Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape. He travels armed with his camera and insightfully captures scenes of the everyday that other people might ignore. Perro en Tlalpan (Dog in Tlalpan, 1992) is a photograph of a dog regally perched under an industrial shelter in the borough of Tlalpan in Mexico City.
Yosuke Takeda started from experimenting with darkroom photography production and he shifted over to digital photography, aware that photographic film and paper were becoming obsolete...
Chanell Stone’s practice explores what she describes as the “re-naturing” of the Black body to the American landscape—an act that aims to complicate and sublimate the history of American slavery into a reimagined relationship between African Americans and the earth...
Working primarily in painting and video, Eric Dizambourg merges the burlesque with the rustic, blurring the boundaries between reality and representation...
Javid Soriano is a filmmaker interested in recording the quotidian aspects of life...
Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape...
Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...
Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape...
Eric Dizambourg’s film presents a bucolic and ludicrous world used as a background for a character who is an actor as well as a performer...
Yosuke Takeda gives the viewer brightly colored views, each of which he has searched out and patiently waited for...
Set in the infamous Tenderloin district of San Francisco, Factotum of the City is a documentary film by Javid Soriano that delves into the life of a former world-class opera singer turned self-styled street hustler...
Natura Negra , which translates to “Black Nature”, is a black-and-white photographic series by Chanell Stone that explores the connection between the Black body and nature within man-made environments...