27H x 25.5W x 2 inches
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage. Iron is one of nature’s most abundant metals. Smith, a philosopher of human detritus and poetic associations, presents it in this work as simultaneously everywhere yet paradoxically forgotten, lost in the heaps of refuse that fill junkyards and vacant lots. She thereby recalls and reclaims something important and elemental—indeed, a material that is integral to the physical fabric of culture and society, one that we associate with incorruptibility and malleability simultaneously.
At a moment when Minimalism and Conceptual Art collided, Southern California-based Alexis Smith began working with discarded street signs, matchbooks, movie posters, and other detritus to become one of the pioneers of conceptual assemblage. Her cryptic comments on the cloudy morality of American culture are derived from pop cultural references including political figures like Richard Nixon, Hollywood films, and pop musicians. This borrowing of literally recycled material and recycled cultural tropes is also seen in the work of Smith’s peers Mike Kelley, Chris Burden, and Vija Celmins.
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The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources...
Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...
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Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...
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...
The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel...
White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
While Untitled (Shuffle) presents the same formal characteristics as the rest of Berman’s verifax collages, this constellation of specific images inside the radio’s frames—the Star of David, Hebrew characters, biblical animals—have Jewish symbolism and attest to the artist’s lasting obsession with the kabala...
Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...
A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s cloths drying rack (2007) was realized in the year of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience...
Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios...
Towhead n’Ganga, enclosed in darkness, lorded over by the sexualized folded high priestless form reflects many of Kelley’s works, in both its compositional and semantic qualities...
Open Mind is a model created by Capote for a traversable public maze that, when seen from above, resembles the human brain...