Towhead n’Ganga, enclosed in darkness, lorded over by the sexualized folded high priestless form reflects many of Kelley’s works, in both its compositional and semantic qualities. The drawing on wood, the popcorn mixture, and the title all manifest a bumpy fullness, a “more-is-more” conflation between supposedly eternal spirituality and everyday stuff. The work’s title points to a serious timelessness completely belied by the materials. While the composition is attractive, the objects themselves efface a potentially straightforward meaning. This is underscored by the label left on the outer bucket, which keeps it tethered to everyday life and away from the free-floating and romantic mysticism associated with the installations of Joseph Beuys.
Mike Kelley’s sculptures, collages, performances, and videos often rework the artifacts of suburban culture into new forms: bodies, carpets, and less-distinct masses. Kelley laces the mess of erotics and death into the material stuff of the American imaginary, such as movies, country music, and stuffed animals. Somehow, Kelley manages to do so in a way that extend these materials’ predilections, rather than counter them.
In the work titled The Glossies (1980), an affinity for photography manifested itself before McCollum actually began to use photography as a medium...
In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights...
Domes #1 represents a significant moment in Chicago’s career when her art began to change from a New York-influenced Abstract Expressionist style to one that reflected the pop-inflected art being made in Los Angeles...
Continuing Oursler’s broader exploration of the moving image, Absentia is one of three micro-scale installations that incorporate small objects and tiny video projections within a miniature active proscenium...
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...
Domes #1 represents a significant moment in Chicago’s career when her art began to change from a New York-influenced Abstract Expressionist style to one that reflected the pop-inflected art being made in Los Angeles...
Continuing Oursler’s broader exploration of the moving image, Absentia is one of three micro-scale installations that incorporate small objects and tiny video projections within a miniature active proscenium...
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...
Though not strictly representational, some objects in Untitled (1962) are recognizable: a flower, an egg, a foot...
In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage...
Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California...
Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California...
In “And so it is” shows the image of a faceless man before a microphone, ready to deliver an important message...
Designed as an installation timed spent is determined by the viewer, as with classical sculpture, Anthems is a piece that is in place, and in time, and an important genre of video within the collection...
Hama Goro works with a traditional method called the Bogolan technique, which is inspired by a method used in Mali to color clothes...