Blindseye Arranger (Max) (2013) features a greyscale arrangement of rudimentary shapes layered atop one another like a dense cluster of wood block prints, the juxtaposition of sharp lines and acute angles creating an abstracted field of rectangular and triangulated forms composed as if in a cubist landscape. As the video progresses, however, a disembodied hand begins to move these forms, animating a pictorial frame that was previously still. The hand – ostensibly the “arranger” of the works title – functions as a metonym of the artist’s hand, quite literally bringing a motionless work to life. The hand in Blindseye Arranger , though, also signals a shift towards the performative, functioning as a reminder that all works of art are created by a maker’s “hand” and, in such, are never fully separate from the context in which they are made. Bress’s gesture towards interdisciplinarity in his work, by extension, signals an important moment in which questions of medium-specificity give way to more trenchant inquiries into notions of authorship and creative process.
Although originally trained in filmmaking and animation, Brian Bress explores the influence of pictorial traditions on contemporary media-based practices. His single-shot videos utilize painterly effects such as geometric abstraction to create visual compositions that blur presumed boundaries between contemporary media-based work and more traditional disciplines such as sculpture and painting. His work is deliberately processed-based and his videos, by extension, explore how visual motifs “evolve” over time through as a viewer engages with a given object or image. Animated figures and actors – such as disembodied hands – disrupt these seemingly still frames, repositioning these works in the context of film while also suggesting the presence of the artist’s hand. Bress’s videos may seem overtly indebted to creative lineages, and his images frequently border on the surreal. But in gesturing towards past works, his videos signal the emergence of creative practices enabled through technological advancements while also offering a meditation on a durational aesthetics privileged in media-based work.
Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook...
In the 1980’s, while browsing Parisian fleamarkets, Barbara Bloom stumbled into an anonymous watercolor (dating to around 1960) in one of Paris’ fleamarkets, probably a study made by an interior designer for a bedroom...
The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...
To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey...
Untitled (City Limits) is a series of five black-and-white photographs of road signs, specifically the signs demarcating city limits of several small towns in California...
In borrowing and subverting images from popular culture, Sadie Benning exposes the media’s role in constructing false and oppressive stereotypes of women, with regard to gender and sexual identity...
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
The theme of the end of the world, of the last man on earth, recurs in our literary and cinematographic culture and in our imaginary: “we had this dream before, the dream that we’re alone.” In The Secret Life of Things , the narrator presents himself as an enthusiast and expert on films announcing the end of the world and those staging someone waking up to discover that they are the only survivor on earth...
Matthew Buckingham presents a narrative directly connected with a highly symbolic site in the United States, the Mount Rushmore Memorial*...
Half Dome Hough Transform by Trevor Paglen merges traditional American landscape photography (sometimes referred as ‘frontier photography’ for sites located in the American West) with artificial intelligence and other technological advances such as computer vision...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...
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...
First Born by Rachel Rose is part of a series of works titled Borns which expands on the artist’s longstanding interest in the organic shape of eggs...
Continuing Oursler’s broader exploration of the moving image, Absentia is one of three micro-scale installations that incorporate small objects and tiny video projections within a miniature active proscenium...
In the 2013 video work, Sitting Feeding Sleeping , Rose combines footage taken of zoo animals living in captivity with screen images that flicker and flash before us...
Behind the simplicity and beauty of this untitled photograph of a brilliantly-colored flowerbed by Félix González-Torres are two remarkable stories of love, loss, and resilience...
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...