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. Using a found photograph depicting a passionate crowd of African Americans—their attitude suggesting the fervor of a civil-rights era audience— Intentionally Left Blanc reverts in its exposed, “positive” format to an image in which select faces are whitened out and erased, the exact inverse of the same view in its “negative” condition. This dialectic of light and dark re-emerges when we view the same faces again, only this time black and featureless, a scattering of disembodied heads amidst a sea of white. The context of the photograph was during protests in the 6os against gerrymandering and redistricting that sought to segregate the black and white populations. Here, Thomas approaches the situation with a revisionist eye, this time erasing and removing the white audience members, and thereby ironically reclaiming the same action they took against the black community.
Employing the visual language and terminology of mass media, and appropriating symbols and images from popular culture, Hank Willis Thomas’ work seeks to question and subvert established definitions and positions with regards to personal identity and the narrative of race. Working across installation, photography, video, and media work, Thomas maintains his photo conceptualist roots, primarily taking source material from found photographs and archives. These images form the basis from which the artist seeks to uncover the fallacies that history claims as truth. His work illustrates how the way history is represented and consumed reinforces generalizations surrounding identity, gender, race and ethnicity, and that as an artist he has an opportunity to expose or to revise those histories from the points of view of the oppressed.
Untitled (Wall Street’s Chosen Few…) is typical of Pettibon’s drawings in which fragments of text and image are united, but yet gaps remain in their signification...
The first iteration of Flutter was specifically conceived for the Pro Arts Gallery space in Oakland in 2010, viewable from the public space of a sidewalk, and the version acquired by the Kadist Collection is an adaptation of it...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive...
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....
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
Defunct Mnemonics (2012) plays off woodworking traditions found in indigenous art in order to create a body of formally minimal objects that are both beautiful in their restraint and profoundly moving in their associations with the totemic...
Celebrating the monstrous other: "Anak Pontianak" and "Nobody" at LumiNation | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Courtesy of The Filmic Eye August 5, 2019 By ila (1,100 words, 6-minute read) The year is 2049: two hundred years since the Pontianak first appeared in writing, marked insignificantly in Hikayat Abdullah as residues of superstitious and foolish beliefs of the Chinese and Malays that have persisted with time...
Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
Relying on repetition and repurposed materials, Soares works to interrogate time—its measurement, its passing, and its meaning...
Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom...
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....
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...
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...
Foreigners Everywhere is a series of neon signs in several different languages...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
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...
As she traces the same shape again and again, Ojih Odutola’s lines become darker and deeper, sometimes pushed to the point where their blackness becomes luminous...
In a style that is unique of Tokoudagba, he evokes the kings, gods and their symbols related to the earth, water, air and fire, usually on a white background...
In the video Blanco sobre Blanco (White on White) , we see a white man appearing in a white screen embedded into a white wall— alluding to Malevich’s White on White series...