3:40 minutes
In Tapitapultas (2012), Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker comment on mass consumerism and pollution by way of a game they invented. The artists used disposable spoons as catapults to shoot thousands of plastic bottle caps at a hole in a concrete platform. The platform was once part of a U. S. military installation in the Panama Canal Zone, and it is now an observation deck in a nature park. As the video comes to an end, the viewer discovers that the bottle caps that fell through the hole accumulated on the forest floor, forming a giant mountain of synthetic waste in the natural landscape.
Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker, who also exhibit individually, have been making work together since 2006, often using a playful approach to address serious sociopolitical themes. Conlon has a background in science and sculpture, and Harker’s is in film and media studies. Their videos merge Conlon’s use of ordinary objects and investigations of human behavior with Harker’s irony and subversion of conventional storytelling methods. Their playful and poetic critiques of contemporary culture frequently use discarded objects to comment on consumption, accumulation, climate, and the ironic beauty of waste-ridden landscapes. Specifically, they examine contradictions in the construction of Panamanian national identity, as well as political and societal disparities between Central America and the United States.
Uncertain Pilgrimage is an ongoing project in which Moore draws from his unplanned travels in recent years...
La Sombra (The Shadow) is a video of Regina Jose Galindo performing with a moving Leopard tank...
In 2012, former Guatemalan President José Efran Ros Montt was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity; Regina José Galindo’s video Tierra is a chilling reimagining of the atrocities recounted during his trial...
Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision...
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
The Last Post was inspired by Sikander’s ongoing interest in the colonial history of the sub-continent and the British opium trade with China...
Reeder’s works often start with language—and his Pasta Paintings are no different...
Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
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...
Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and riffing on the “I Want You” army recruitment campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, Labat asked Bay Area residents to interpret the slogan and make their own demands of the public in a series of live performance auditions...
Video: Catherine Opie on photographing leading British artists | Blog | Royal Academy of Arts Catherine Opie in the RA Collection Gallery Video: Catherine Opie on photographing leading British artists Read more Become a Friend Video: Catherine Opie on photographing leading British artists Published 8 September 2023 Catherine Opie discusses her portraits of David Hockney, Anish Kapoor, Gillian Wearing, Isaac Julien and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, featured in our free display in the Collection Gallery...
Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape...
War Footage is a series of wall-mounted works composed of 16mm film leader, tightly bound to flag-shaped panels by the artist...
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
In this work, a woman sits on a couch with her shirt pulled up to expose her pierced nipples, which are connected by a chain...
Chris Johanson’s Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat) (2010) pictures a canoe drifting toward an off-kilter horizon line, which demarcates the cobalt sea from the cerulean sky...