Arpedia

The three monkeys in Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak are a recurring motif in Gupta’s work and refer to the Japanese pictorial maxim of the “three wise monkeys” in which Mizaru covers his eyes to “see no evil,” Kikazaru covers his ears to “hear no evil,” and Iwazaru covers his mouth to “speak no evil.” For the various performative and photographic works that continue this investigation and critique of the political environment, Gupta stages children and adults holding their own or each other’s eyes, mouths and ears. These images suggest that seemingly mobilized societies can actually produce more fear and myths, and that no real freedom is ensured. Instead of facilitating the free circulation of ideas, “advanced” political and technological systems often generate more cultural clichés, wars, and terror.

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My Name as Written by Bruce Nauman

Mungo Thomson

My Name as Written by Bruce Nauman

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Eclipse

Cerith Wyn Evans

Eclipse

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Stanley "Tom" Durrell, Tinsmith

Sharon Lockhart

Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor, through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U. S. naval shipbuilding company—in Maine. Stanley “Tom” Durrell, Tinsmith (2008) belongs to a group of portrait-like photographs of the shipyard’s workers lunchboxes. Created over the period of a year, Lockhart’s film and accompanying still photographs are intended as an exploration of the social spaces inside this kind of workplace.

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Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother

Wong Hoy Cheong

Created for the tenth Lyon Bienniale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society. Named after an American daytime soap opera that been running for over forty years, Days of Our Lives is a series of six photographs that explore contemporary Europeaness. Here, domestic, everyday scenes drawn from French paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon——preparing food, relaxing, reading and playing music, giving charity to the poor, being evicted from home, or going off to War—are reenacted by Muslim Nigerians, Iranians, Turkish, and Buddhist Burmese minorities.

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Untitled 6/10 i-xxii

Nathaniel Dorsky

Dorsky’s pieces included in the Kadist Collection are small still photographs from twelve of his most important films. Here, the still images function in the same way as his cinematographic work: Highly aesthetic, they allow for the appearance of intricate visual patterns and layers of meaning that take scenes of everyday life as its source material. Both Dorsky’s cinematic and photographic works follow a stream of consciousness that rejects representation or fixed narrative structure.

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Fedex® Large Kraft Box 2004 FEDEX 155143 REV 10/04 SSCC, International Priority, Los Angeles-Beijing trk#875468976062, September 9-14, 2011, International Priority, Bejing-London trk#874594463978, March 13-15, 2012, International Priority, London-San Francisco, trk#777001529227, August 16-18, 2016, International Priority, San Francisco-Beijing, trk# 775046700145, October 27-November 5, 2021

Walead Beshty

Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination. Displayed with the cardboard boxes (and their shipping labels, which chart the journey in a different way) that contain them during the journey, these damaged forms draw from minimalist sculpture, and conceptual artworks that focused on distance, travel, and virtual connections.

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7-headed Lalandau Hat

Yee I-Lann

7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo. The materiality and form of this traditional headpiece represents the strength and fierceness of forest warriors. Their ‘chimneys’ on top are intended to resemble trees in the jungle onto which hornbill feathers would once have been stuffed.

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Sirens

Paul Kos

Taking its title from the eponymous mythological creature—famously featured as sea nymphs in Homer’s Odyssey. Sirens exist in literature across many cultures including Ancient Greece and India, described as part bird and part woman, or like a mermaid. They were said to charm men by their song, and, having first lulled them to sleep, tear them to pieces.

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Excerpt (Sealed) (Brown)

Stephen G. Rhodes

For his series of digital collages Excerpt (Sealed)… Rhodes appropriated multiple images from mass media and then sprayed an X on top of their glass and frame. This visual seal refers to the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in which rescue workers spray painted the doors of the houses they searched giving the date, the team and the number of bodies found. Excerpt (Sealed) (Brown) is a multilayered collage with contradictory imagery—from New Orleans debris to the American eagle and a theater curtain.

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Peg and Jon

John Houck

Houck’s Peg and John was made as part of a series of photographic works that capture objects from the artist’s childhood. In this image, drafting materials (pencils, compasses, and protractors) are laid out next to shotgun shell casings. Presenting these objects in juxtaposition but without commentary, Houck offers a partial but interesting glimpse into his own biography.

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Wall Window or Bar Sign (Insanity is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over and Expecting Different Results)

Mungo Thomson

Starting with Bruce Nauman’s iconic artwork, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) , Mungo Thomson’s neon sign is one of a series that replaces Nauman’s quixotic mini-manifesto with aphorisms from ‘recovery’ culture, especially those made popular by alcoholics anonymous. Thomson is referencing the lore that Nauman’s work (the first of many neons he’d make in the following years) had been inspired by a neon beer sign found in a corner-store in San Francisco that he used as his studio in the late 60s. This particular work has a self-critical subtext, as it also suggests the act of using another artist’s work, in an endless spiral of influence, is akin to a form of insanity.

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Nothing New

Oded Hirsch

Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel. In the video, a fallen parachutist hangs tangled by his own lines, suspended between two electrical towers in a surreally desolate landscape of overgrown fields in the Jordan Valley of Israel. A group of over a hundred men and women approach the towers, working with almost mechanic efficiency to free the parachutist from the power lines overhead.

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Untitled #242, 104, 975 combinations of a 2×2 grid, 18 colors

John Houck

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Untitled #242 is part of Houck’s Aggregates Series, which uses digital tools to manipulate chosen sets and pairs of colors, creating colorful index sheets, bathed in colors and lines. Houck transforms these simple outputs physically, folding, lighting, photographing, and re-printing them, only to fold, photograph, and re-print again. An MFA graduate from UCLA, John Houck works primarily in the medium of photography and specializes in still-life vignettes.

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Intentionally Left Blanc

Hank Willis Thomas

Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting. Using a found photograph depicting a passionate crowd of African Americans—their attitude suggesting the fervor of a civil-rights era audience— Intentionally Left Blanc reverts in its exposed, “positive” format to an image in which select faces are whitened out and erased, the exact inverse of the same view in its “negative” condition. This dialectic of light and dark re-emerges when we view the same faces again, only this time black and featureless, a scattering of disembodied heads amidst a sea of white.

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California Stories Attempt to correlate social class with elevation above main harbor channel (San Pedro, July 1975)

Allan Sekula

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

San Pedro is a seaside city, part of the Los Angeles Harbor, sitting on the edge of a channel. California Stories: Attempt to correlate social class with elevation above main harbor channel (San Pedro, July 1975) (1973–2011) is a series of coupled gelatin silver prints that show the artist using his hand to measure the elevation of various pieces of real estate, ranging from a manicured mansion to a ramshackle beach house. A direct equation becomes evident between the social strata these homes represent and the height at which the artist holds his hand.

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Boat with Legs

Francis Alÿs

Boat with Legs

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Negligee

Jeff Burton

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.

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let this be us

Richard T. Walker

let this be us is a single-channel video by Richard T. Walker featuring the artist himself roaming around the wilderness of a deserted landscape, sporadically humming a melody, strumming a guitar, or playing a few notes on a keyboard. As he traverses between striking locations we see him carrying large photographic prints of the same landscape that he is treading, which he then rests onto tripods so that the horizon in the photograph seamlessly matches that of the real landscape. As we hear the music, Walker comes in and out of view, dissipating into the landscape as his body becomes invisible, hidden behind the photographic prints.

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Baby Shoes, Never Worn

John Houck

Baby Shoes, Never Worn is part of photographer John Houck’s series of restrained still-life photographs capturing objects from his childhood. The image depicts a box, addressed to the artist’s mother, that once contained—it can be assumed—baby shoes. Houck layers the photograph with multiple exposures, lending an uneasy tripling effect to the static object.

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Two videos, three photographs, several related masterpieces, and American Art

Yan Xing

The title of this series – Two videos, three photographs, several related masterpieces and American art – is paradoxical, suggesting the work is conceived in relation to its medium and a situation in art history and the region of the world in which it was made. Paradoxical but in the end, often true of the way in which art history is written. The presence of black men and the term “American Art” brings us back to Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book .

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A meditation on the possibility…

Daniel Joseph Martinez

Martinez’s sculpture A meditation on the possibility… of romantic love or where you goin’ with that gun in your hand , Bobby Seale and Huey Newton discuss the relationship between expressionism and social reality in Hitler’s painting depicts the legendary Black Panther leaders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. By using Carrara marble, a material usually associated with heroic public sculptures, Martinez casts the history of African-American revolutionaries into the artistic tradition of monumentality. Like the artist’s earlier work included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, an interactive piece made up with pins that read, “I CAN’T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE,” A meditation on the possibility… continues Martinez’s effort to expose cultural contradictions and increase public awareness.

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Untitled (Sten-Frenke House #04)

Luisa Lambri

Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon. Designed by the architect Richard Neutra, its gray glass, white expanses, and simple forms exude austerity. Luisa Lambri’s photograph Untitled (Sten-Frenke House #04) (2007)recalls the unembellished elegance of the structure while also alluding to modernist painting; the image is less a picture than an abstract expanse that conveys its own flatness.

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Untitled #275_06, 2 colors, #FF8F89, #9E7A8F

John Houck

Untitled #275_06, 2 colors, #FF8F89, #9E7A8F

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Perro en Tlalpan (Dog in Tlalpan)

Gabriel Orozco

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.

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Arms & Legs (Specif. Elbows & Knees), etc.: Arm (with Bottle)

John Baldessari

Arms & Legs (Specif. Elbows & Knees), etc. : Arm (with Bottle) belongs to Baldessari’s most recent series of paintings in which the artist brings together photographic, painted, and three-dimensional elements, to juxtapose unlikely body fragments such as noses and ears, elbows and knees, or eyebrows and foreheads.

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Baobab

Tacita Dean

The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits. The monumental and unnatural aspect of the baobabs turns them into strange and anthropomorphic personalities. Adding to the descriptive aspect of the film, the sound is a recording of the environment, of sounds made by animals, and participates in this peaceful contemplation.

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Angela (crotch grab)

Catherine Opie

Angela (crotch grab)

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Freeway Series

Catherine Opie