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.
The prolific Chris Johanson produces paintings, zines, installations, and sculptures that are notable for their earnest, almost childlike abstraction. His work delves unabashedly into the emotional, social, and spiritual aspects of human nature, tracking points of commonality and difference using simple shapes and lines as well as an unflagging sense of magnanimous humor.
Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...
Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters...
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage...
The Last Post was inspired by Sikander’s ongoing interest in the colonial history of the sub-continent and the British opium trade with China...
Reeder’s works often start with language—and his Pasta Paintings are no different...
This particular drawing, like many of Grotjahn’s works, presents a decentered single-point perspective...
Shot in the streets of Tokyo, Collapse , is a meditation on the passing of time and on the complicated way in which we are smashed between the past and the future...
The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights...
Tarantism is the name of disease which appeared in southern Italy, resulting from the bite of a spider called Tarantula...
Modotti’s Diego Rivera Mural: Billionaires Club; Ministry of Education, Mexico D...
Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco...
Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon...
Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom...
In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat...
Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...
In Tapitapultas (2012), Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker comment on mass consumerism and pollution by way of a game they invented...
McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works...
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...