1:23 minutes
Parked on the shoulder of a single lane highway running through a desert landscape, Marlene looks over her shoulder from inside the car at a fierce storm looming over a distant horizon. Turning her head toward and away from the scene she says, “When I look for the lightning it never strikes, but when I look away it does.” And indeed, the lightning does seem to strike only when she turns away. Before filming Lightning , Paul Kos had done a fair amount of research on lightning, much of it conducted at the lightning research lab at the University of Colorado. He found that in a very good storm it takes about fifteen or twenty seconds for lightning to strike in the same place in the same part of the sky because the atmosphere has to re-ionize. Whether or not one is familiar with the science of storms, Marlene’s repeated deadpan statement seems less like a calculated action and more like a sigh of resignation. Her assured stare dares the viewer to disagree with her perceived reality, despite the fact that lightning can’t be clearly seen until almost halfway through the work. The short length of the film contributes to a feeling of mistrust or disbelief—this blip of a scene could be a glitch, like when one’s brain skips in a moment of déjà vu. Ending abruptly and unresolved, Lighting offers a subtle commentary on truth and fiction, the stories we tell ourselves and others, and perhaps the earth’s indifference to any narrative we might create for it.
Paul Kos works with everyday materials and video to enact a playful conceptual engagement with life and the world. He responds to simple, humble materials and the indigenous elements of specific sites, which he mines for their physical properties and metaphoric possibilities. Throughout these pieces, Kos’s work uses humor to relate the stuff of life back to larger questions of time and spirituality.
Tino Sehgal’s This Exhibition requires an interpreter (in this particular piece, a gallery attendant) to faux faint each and every time a visitor enters into a given space...
AIDS Ring by General Idea is a cast metal ring, which takes as its basis Robert Indiana’s iconic “LOVE” design, appropriating its pop aesthetic, and totalizing, simplistic universal messaging to instead emphasize the severity of the AIDS epidemic that occurred in the 1970s...
Slow Graffiti was produced for Da Corte’s exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 2017...
Trevor Paglen’s ongoing research focuses on artificial intelligence and machine vision, i.e...
The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits...
In 2008, Grassie was invited by the Whitechapel Gallery to document the transformation of some of its spaces...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...
The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits...
The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel...
San Pedro is a seaside city, part of the Los Angeles Harbor, sitting on the edge of a channel...
Like many of Larry Bell’s works, VFGY9 deals primarily with the viewer’s experience of sight...
In 1977, as an already-established artist best known for his films, Bruce Conner began to photograph punk rock shows at Mabuhay Gardens, a San Francisco club and music venue...
Burrito Bay is a video by George Kuchar that follows the format of a diary or travelogue centered on a tropical trip to Acapulco, Mexico...
Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...
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...