Photography (Photography)

The Royal House of Allure is a name of a safe house on mainland Lagos where members of the queer community in need of boarding, due to various circumstances, live together. These houses are more than just places of survival; they are a physical embodiment of radical queer expression that encourage solidarity. The Royal House of Allure was initially conceived following an investigation of how social media influences celebrity culture.

Photography (Photography)

For his series of digital collages Excerpt (Sealed)… Rhodes appropriated multiple images from mass media and then sprayed an X on top of their glass and frame. This visual seal refers to the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in which rescue workers spray painted the doors of the houses they searched giving the date, the team and the number of bodies found. Excerpt (Sealed) (Brown) is a multilayered collage with contradictory imagery—from New Orleans debris to the American eagle and a theater curtain.

Painting (Painting)

Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911. “Bread for all, and Roses, too’—a slogan of the women in the West,” is Oppenheim’s opening line, alluding to the workers’ goal for wages and conditions that would allow them to do more than simply survive. Thomas’ painting includes several black, white, brown, yellow, and red raised fists—clenched and high in the air in the internationally recognized symbol of solidarity, resistance, and unity.

Painting (Painting)

Francisco Herrero Peñuela uses old forms to make his elaborate, richly textured surfaces. Practicing a form of marquetry common in 15th century Italy—intarsia—Peñuela pieces together fragments of wood to create abstract images in warm tones of gold, brown, and black. While original Italian intarsia would have been representational, embedding landscapes, objects, and narrative scenes directly into walls, Peñuela’s compositions hedge away from direct representation, with shapes and pattern emerging organically out of his carefully arranged wooden pieces.

Photography (Photography)

John Houck’s brown- , sienna- and golden-toned composition, Untitled #185, 65, 535 combinations of a 2×2 grid, 16 colors , features densely packed lines of color moving diagonally across the creased page. Houck uses a series of self-designed software programs to create these intricate grids of color and line, riffing off of Sol LeWitt, perhaps, in a digital age. Houck takes the output of these programs and then manipulates them manually, creasing the pages of the index print, and then re-photographing them.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

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.

Painting (Painting)

thanks for staying alive Fern.1994 by rafa esparza is from a body of work that pays homage to youth culture in the 90s. The work is based on the popularity of mid-90s era Star Shots photographs, which usually featured graphic backgrounds and highly glamorized subjects wearing heavy makeup, matching outfits, perfectly coiffed hair, and dramatic expressions. In Los Angeles, esparza remembers many Black and Brown youths going to the mall (where many Star Shots photo studios were located) to circulate the photos with personal messages written on the back.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Braga’s video work Provisão (2009) opens with a still shot of a clearing in a forest, shoots of grass emerging from a muddy brown patch of seemingly dry and barren earth. As the camera fades to black, the viewer hears the repeated sound of a shovel striking dirt. The camera fades back to the clearing and zooms in on a shirtless man digging up the ground.

Painting (Painting)

“When Pope. L shakes his head he makes drawings that keep him from laugh-­crying to death,” writes Helen Molesworth about William Pope. L’s Skin Set Drawings .

Installation (Installation)

Defined as entropy, the second law of thermodynamics proposes that energy is more easily dispersed than it is concentrated. One basic illustration of entropy is to imagine white and black sand: once mixed together, it is highly unlikely that the contrasting grains of sand can be separated and restored to their original distinct color groups. Arturo’s Trópico Entrópico ( Entropic Tropics , 2012) considers the colonization of the American continent as a similarly irreversible process of cultural entropy.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Manuel Correa’s short film Didn’t Know I Died is a testimonial portrait of the acclaimed Colombian poet Olga Elena Mattei. Earlier in her life during a simple medical operation, Mattei was declared medically dead. In the film, she recounts her first memory upon waking up, a dream.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Wolowiec’s textile work Not This Time (2015) translates pixelated images into sensuous fabric and ink based forms that are at once beautiful in their abstraction and anxiety-ridden in their visualization of a malfunctioning digital world. In order to produce this work, Wolowiec selects a grouping of digital images from web-based sources that have a glitch, an aberration in which a short-lived technical fault results in distortions in an image’s display. Through a dye sublimination ink process, the images are printed onto strands of thread pixel by pixel, which the artist then weaves into a final work.

Photography (Photography)

Winfield St by Sadie Barnette depicts a seldom documented scene of men and boys in an intimate domestic setting. In the large format photograph three young boys and a man sit at a dining room table, eating a meal together. One boy is mid-bite, while another looks directly at the camera, obscuring the face of the adult.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In keeping with her mythological proclivity, Minotaur (2009) casts a new light on an old narrative. The film takes the ancient Greek story of the half-man, half-bull as its title subject, but at its core, Minotaur is an homage to pioneering modern dancer and choreographer, Anna Halprin. Along with Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer, Halprin’s fearless and lifelong dance practice paved the way for the evolution of modern and contemporary dance as we understand it today.

Photography (Photography)

In his composition, Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk, Lassry’s subjects are mirrored in their surroundings (both figuratively, through the chocolate colored backdrop and the brown frame; and literally, in the milky white, polished surface of the table), as the artist plays with color, shape, and the conventions of representational art both within and outside of the photographic tradition. Elad Lassry explores how visual languages are constructed across multiple disciplines and media. His larger body of work responds to the relationship between artistic mediums and their forms, and his prints question familiar modes of viewership and our continuous desire to find and identify clear narratives in photographs.

Photography (Photography)

In the Collage II (Marie) (2013), Shorr seems to have an ostensibly clear subject, a female subject identified in the work’s title as “Marie,” a slim but athletic woman with brown hair pictured reclining atop a brilliantly white sheet draped against a marbled tan-and-white backdrop. Although photographed topless, Marie is depicted in slightly contorted poses that emphasize the curves of her figure while also obstructing the viewer’s gaze. Printed on high gloss paper, Marie’s portrait has the polished veneer of magazine spread, and the two portraits on display offer different vantages of the same subject.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history. In 1995, OJ Simpson—a well-known American football player—was accused of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Based on the courtroom footage, Ezawa uses his signature style to create an abstract and graphically simplified echo of what happened in the room.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Dragon is the Frame by Mary Helena Clark is an elegy that is somewhat paradoxically organized as a film noir or murder mystery, one that pays direct homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo . But the parts don’t fit, and it is only in the eventual recognition of this faux raccord that Clark’s higher purpose becomes apparent. As we hear Bernard Herrmann’s score, we see the Golden Gate Bridge, Mission Dolores, and other Vertigo locations in the present day.

Painting (Painting)

Fairy #2 (2011) depicts a surreal scene of roughly assembled household ephemera, potted plants, and a faintly visible figure rendered in thin red line. The picture shows a grouping of tables and stools arranged in a dense cluster. A collection of objects, all brown or burlap-hued, cover their surfaces: ceramic pots, wooden planks, roughly geometric wooden sculptures, and even a small figure that perches precariously atop of miniature cube alongside a forked wood finish form.

Painting (Painting)

Too Many Names by Troy Chew is a patchwork of contemporary Black culture and resistance, including hand-sewn symbols and patterns found in the coats of arms of the kings of the Dahomey region (now Benin) that ruled from 1600-1900. This painting is part of the series Out the Mud, a longterm project in which the artist explores African American history through the lens of traditional mudcloth techniques found in the West African countries involved in the Transatlantic-slave trade. The title of the series references the technique and materials for making mudcloth.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees. The steely grey sky stands in stark contrast to the vehicle’s luminously pristine white finish and makes this already deathly object seem even more ghostly. The grass underneath is half-turned brown and further marks this as a lifeless landscape.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Following Bruce Nauman’s seminal performance Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967) – which sees the artist carefully trace a small delimited area of his studio exaggerating the movements of his hips as he places one foot in front of the other – Idir reproduces these performative gestures in Algiers, Algeria. Idir continues the artist’s previous work on ‘hittistes’, which translates as someone who spends their day with their back to the wall, the city’s unemployed and the gestures proper to them. In collaboration with cinematographer Babette Mangolte, Carole Douillard’s performance takes place across three emblematic sites within the city: Bab El Oued, Les Sablettes and Diar Es Saâda.

Installation (Installation)

Milton Friedman on the wonder of the free market pencil is an installation based on 42 blank pages. On the first page, one can read the original version in English of the liberal speech by Milton Friedman on “The Story of the pencil”. On the other pages, the same text has been translated into 41 different languages by using Google Translate, before coming back to English.