Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision. Often the artist works with the motifs of the counterculture and contemporary non-religious spiritualism. The figure hangs suspended—seemingly ascending—animation. The figure looks like some kind of countercultural superman empowered by myriad alternative experiences, as worthy of myth as the heralded Laocoön.
Ben Shaffer’s works are dynamic installations that integrate sculpture, painting, and performance. His complex pieces often require direct interaction from viewers, eschewing simple subject-object relationships in favor of relational negotiations. Through his makeshift neo- psychedelia, Shaffer explores the legacy of counter-cultural imagery, specifically its fragile utopic horizons and ever-receding promises of enlightenment and transcendence. Shaffer lives and works in Los Angeles, and received his MFA from Claremont University in Southern California.
Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape...
Reeder’s works often start with language—and his Pasta Paintings are no different...
This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series...
Casa de la cabeza (2011) is a drawing of the words of the title, which translate literally into English as “house of the head.” Ortiz uses this humorous phrase to engage the idea of living in your head....
Natasha Wheat’s Kerosene Triptych (2011) is composed of three images, one each from the digital files of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Field Museum tropical research archive...
Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world...
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...
Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely...
Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California...
Like many of Opie’s works, Mike and Sky presents female masculinity to defy a binary understanding of gender...
Itch explores the relationship between technology and daily human experience with a motorized arm that extends from within the gallery’s wall, moving up and down while holding a projector that shows a desperately scratching pair of hands....
Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago...
Concerned with the early history of Singapore, Zai Kuning spent many years living with and researching the history of the Riau peoples who were the first inhabitants of Singapore...