Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California. The photograph is framed upside down; these “inverted trees” follow Graham’s early experiments with the camera lucida, a room-sized pinhole camera that dates back to ancient times and which he has used to photograph trees from various regions. Through these works Graham looks back at the history of photography while making the viewers aware of their own retinal experience. In the case of the Ponderosa Pine series, the artist’s use of a pinewood frame gives the elephantine inverted tree both a physical presence and a rather morbid veil.
Conceptual artist Rodney Graham’s oeuvre is highly versatile and intellectual. By incorporating fictional narratives and alternative interpretations into an existing context, Graham creates visual puns that layer historical reference to examine social and philosophical systems. Not only is Graham the behind-the-scenes sculptor, photographer, filmmaker, inventor, scholar, writer and singer in his projects, he also literally appears in the finished works, impersonating various fictional characters.
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...
Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series, Detroit Photos , which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures...
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 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...
This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013...
Tanaka’s unique understanding of objects and materials is reflected in the four photographs that document his Process of Blowing Flour ...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...
Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...
In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel...
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...
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...
Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city...
Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969...
Fridge-Freezer is a 2-channel video installation where Yoshua Okón explores the darker side of suburbia, d escribed by the artist as “ the ideal environment for a numb existence of passive consumerism and social a nd environmental disengagement...