Painting (Painting)

Chris Johanson’s paintings, sculptures, and installations break down everyday scenes and commonplace dramas into colorful forms; the darkest sides of humanity are invoked with humor. The works comment on subjects such as capitalism, consumerism, the art world, and therapy. The triptych I Am a Human, Abstract Foil, No Humans IV (2004) is a meditation on the cosmos.

Painting (Painting)

Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building. Viewers unwittingly become voyeurs, peering through the rectangles that stand for windows and observing the residents therein, who ponder questions both mundane and existential: “Where is Ron now?” and “What have I become?” The queries and characters are treated democratically—not judged, praised, or subjected to hierarchy. While their thoughts are specific, the painting captures a universal urban activity: looking across to the building next door and wondering about its residents, all the while knowing that they have probably looked over and wondered about us, as well.

Painting (Painting)

Chris Johanson’s Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat) (2010) pictures a canoe drifting toward an off-kilter horizon line, which demarcates the cobalt sea from the cerulean sky. An orange-haired figure, oar positioned in mid-stroke, looks ahead—whether toward an edge or an infinite expanse, it is impossible to tell. Echoing a trope that recurs in Greek epic poetry, transcendental painting, and current-day reality television, the character is alone with nature.

Photography (Photography)

Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012). In photographing seemingly mundane images of doorways and walls, Wiley collapses the viewer’s experience of inhabiting space by foregrounding features that we all too often miss in our built environment: the peeling white paint on a Corinthian column or the rusty studs on a blue door.

Photography (Photography)

Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012). In photographing seemingly mundane images of doorways and walls, Wiley collapses the viewer’s experience of inhabiting space by foregrounding features that we all too often miss in our built environment: the peeling white paint on a Corinthian column or the rusty studs on a blue door.

Painting (Painting)

Taken from the title of the incredibly influential punk/hardcore record I AGAINST I by the Bad Brains, Untitled (blue) is an acrylic painting on reflective paper by Chris Duncan is part of a larger body of work titled EYE AGAINST I . This title references Duncan’s early artistic influences from the punk and hardcore music communities in tandem with his conceptual interest in perception and optics. This small painting features a glowing cluster of colorful dots on a bright blue background, also created from an accumulation of blue dots in varying tones.

Painting (Painting)

Contrast to the bustling and unrelenting experience of a city such as Hong Kong, Chris Huen Sin Kan paints the tranquil interiors of his apartment, where he leads a modest and almost hermit-like life. He does not try to capture a particular moment, but rather the simultaneously changes that occur before him in time, exploring the nuances of light and reflections and recording movements in his apartment, his dog’s behavior and reactions, the way his plant change over time, all in an attempt to find a visual expression of his cognitive experience. Doodood and John are the names of his dog and the plant.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Untitled

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage. The surfboard, an emblem of Southern California, emblazoned with the image of an eight-ball, references numerous tropes and clichés of American popular culture, specifically subcultures related to pool halls, surfing, and beaches. Indeed, this model-scale surfboard may be a future pop-culture relic, referencing a particular surfer or era of board design.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Sara Cwynar’s composite photographs of found objects and images court feelings of time passing. Using studio sets, collage, and re-photography, she produces intricate tableaux that draw from magazine advertisements, postcards, or catalogs. Cwynar is interested in how design and popular images work on our psyches, in how their visual strategies infiltrate our consciousness.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage. Iron is one of nature’s most abundant metals. Smith, a philosopher of human detritus and poetic associations, presents it in this work as simultaneously everywhere yet paradoxically forgotten, lost in the heaps of refuse that fill junkyards and vacant lots.

Installation (Installation)

In Felicitas, we follow the converging routes of three characters: Felicitas, Michael and Andrew (the artist’s father-in-law who also features elsewhere). Felicitas is thedaughter of a German industrialist who immigrated to Rio after the Second World War. She is the one visible with a toucan in several images.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Dora Garcia’s work is a result of institutional critique and more generally that of language, following the conceptual artists of the 1960s like Weiner and Kosuth and Fraser from the 1980s and 1990s. What a fucking wonderful audience (2008) is positioned conveniently at the crossroads of several trends identified in the work of the artist. The performance from which it is derived, was made at the Biennale of Sydney in 2008, taking the form of a guided tour at the Museum of Modern Art in Sydney and focuses on artworks that were not physically present.