Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor. The series riffs on previous investigations by the artist such as his meticulous depictions of masculine political figures, which included a headless J. Edgar Hoover and a Hitler head floating vulnerably in the center of a white expanse (Hitler’s iconic mustache was crafted from the artist’s pubic hair). Rendered in soft graphite, the imposing Knights embody the ostensibly conflicting ideals of chivalrous deference and invulnerable masculinity.
An expert draftsman well versed in semiotics, Karl Haendel strategically manipulates tangled visual, material, and textual themes, often to humorous and evocative effect. His juxtapositions are as resonant as they are unexpected, whether they take the form of layered graphite drawings, video, or installation. Haendel’s distinct brand of honest humor, honed in his current hometown of Los Angeles, is rooted in the rigorous studies he undertook at Brown University (BA), UCLA (MFA), and the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Victory at Sea is a simple mechanism made from cardboard and found materials that mimics the Phenakistoscope, an early cinematic apparatus...
The title Untitled Passport II was first used by Felix Gonzalez-Torres in an unlimited edition of small booklets, each containing sequenced photographs of a soaring bird against an open sky...
The work La Loge Harlem focuses on the history of Harlem and its development over the last 200 years...
Behind the simplicity and beauty of this untitled photograph of a brilliantly-colored flowerbed by Félix González-Torres are two remarkable stories of love, loss, and resilience...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios...
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
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...
Created during Zhao Renhui’s residency at Kadist SF in 2014, Zhao Renhui began observing and cataloguing insects inspired by the scientific impulse towards exhaustive taxonomy of Sacramento-based Dr...
Dale Harding’s installation Body of Objects consists of eleven sculptural works that the artist based on imagery found at sandstone sites across Carnarvon Gorge in Central Queensland...
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
In Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012), Tossin documents the remains of Henry Ford’s rubber enterprise Fordlândia, built in 1928 in the Brazilian Amazon to export cultivated rubber for the booming automobile industry...
This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series...
Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining....
MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...
The stained glass windows of Chloé Quenum’s Les Allégories evoke the sacred and describe the movement of a rooster in the form of patterns extracted from a wax fabric found in Benin...