Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger was Farmer’s first kinetic sculpture that added a cinematic character to an “ever-reconfiguring play presented in real time.” The assembly of various objects and props on top of a large platform constitutes not only a work, but, to a certain extent, a show in itself. The title of the piece comes from the literal translation of René Magritte’s painting from 1938, La Durée Poignardée , whose more familiar translation is “Time Transfixed.”
Geoffrey Farmer borrows equally from the traditions of installation and conceptual art to create carefully staged works that emphasize temporality and fiction, and examine history, art history, and popular culture. His interest in theatricality is particularly evident in pieces like Theater of Cruelty (2009) and And Finally the Street Becomes the Main Character [Clock] (2008) in which various fragments are assembled into epic narratives. Through these stagings, Farmer critiques modernity’s construction of history, temporality, and fiction.
Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion) is part of a series drawn from architectural objects that mark the boundary of public and private spaces Wong encountered while strolling in Hong Kong...
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...
Poised with tool in hand, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Carpenter (2012) reaches forward, toward his workbench...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series, Detroit Photos , which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures...
The lengthy titles in Chen Xiaoyun’s work often appear as colophons to his photographs that invite the viewer to a process of self realization through contemplating the distance between word and image...
Sign #1 , Sign #2 , Sign #3 were included in “Found Object Assembly”, Copeland’s 2009 solo show at Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco...
Untitled (Women) (2011) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity...
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...
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...
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...
Uncertain Pilgrimage is an ongoing project in which Moore draws from his unplanned travels in recent years...
Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, and politics through everyday interventions...
Choke documents the artist filming a wrestler “choking out” his teammate until he is unconscious...
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....
The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization...