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...
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...
Though not strictly representational, some objects in Untitled (1962) are recognizable: a flower, an egg, a foot...
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...
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...
Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago...
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...
Kwan Sheung Chi’s work One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills...
Shot in the streets of Tokyo, Collapse , is a meditation on the passing of time and on the complicated way in which we are smashed between the past and the future...
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage...
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...
In the six-minute single-channel video Higher Horse , Kate Gilmore perches herself on top of a tall pile of plaster blocks, in front of a pink colored wall with vein-like streaks of red...