Telescopic Pole is an adjustable telescopic pole that extends vertically from floor to ceiling and is held up by its own internal pressure. The ends, protected by two, cut-open tennis balls, recall the legs of a walker. For Rantanen’s second solo exhibition at Jancar Jones Gallery, San Francisco in 2010, one pole was placed inside the gallery while the other was located outside. This visual echo both suggested reflection and called attention to the physical viewing conditions. The muffled poles seemed to connect the spaces, to hold them up and together, while the fixity of their positions was in tension with the idea of movement suggested by the allusion to a walking-aid.
Chadwick Rantanen is an emerging, Los Angeles-based artist. Unlike his previous works, which were rather influenced by arte-povera sculpture, his recent pieces are closer to the aesthetics, language, and materials of industrial design.
His Deck Painting I recalls the simplistic stripes of conceptual artist Daniel Buren, or the minimal lines of twentieth century abstract painting, but is in reality a readymade, fashioned from repurposed fabric of deck chairs...
Glaze (Savana) (2005) is an assemblage of found materials: a car wheel, a tire, and a wooden plinth of the type traditionally used to display sculpture...
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...
Bruce Conner is best known for his experimental films, but throughout his career he also worked with pen, ink, and paper to create drawings ranging from psychedelic patterns to repetitious inkblot compositions...
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage...
Barbara Kasten’s Studio Construct 51 depicts an abstract still life: a greyscale photograph of clear translucent panes assembled into geometric forms, the hard lines of their edges converging and bisecting at various points...
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...
Every work in Hoeber’s 2011 series Execution Changes is titled in alphanumeric code...
LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel...
Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision...
The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel...
Kwan Sheung Chi’s work One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills...
Natasha Wheat’s Kerosene Triptych (2011) is composed of three images, one each from the digital files of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Field Museum tropical research archive...
Justice (2014) presents viewers with a curious assemblage: a wooden gallows with slightly curved spindles protruding from the topmost plank, which in turn is covered with rudimentary netting, the threads slackly dangling like a loose spider’s web or an rib cage that’s been cracked open...
Reeder’s works often start with language—and his Pasta Paintings are no different...