Photography (Photography)

Seven family members and a cat all squeezed into the small five-room house, where Motoyuki Daifu grew up in Yokohama. This young photographer’s Family Project series documents the chaos of his family’s home life. Viewers of Daifu’s color photographs peer into the cramped, cluttered, and intimate world of their living quarters, what would normally be hidden from outsiders.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Choke documents the artist filming a wrestler “choking out” his teammate until he is unconscious. This closed circuit of dominance and submission between two powerful men, is echoed by the closed circuit of the video through which the viewer takes on the role of voyeur. The artist’s presence in the piece not only calls attention to its staging, but inverts the traditional power dynamic of the “male gaze” and gender roles.

Photography (Photography)

In Jackass (2008) by Ari Marcopoulos, his two sons, Cairo and Ethan, are pictured relaxing in a disheveled bedroom in their Sonoma home. One plays with some sort of board game while the other holds either a book or DVD of the movie Jackass Number Two, presumably the source of the photograph’s title. As Marcopoulos has continued to document his sons, and as they have become teenagers, the images of them begin to closely resemble the teenagers in much of his earlier work.

Photography (Photography)

Charwai Tsai’s photograph documents her Hermit Crab Project installation upon the construction site of gallery Sora in Tokyo. Tsai placed live hermit crabs and shells in a sandy enclosure at the site, writing fragments of The One China policy and the Taiwanese Independence statements on each shell. As the hermit crabs moved and swapped shells, they formed new connections between the statements.

Photography (Photography)

The Italian photographer Tina Modotti is known for her documentation of the mural movement in Mexico. She had a keen eye for architectural composition, and captured eloquent details using a delicate platinum print process. In 1929 she was deported from Mexico because of her involvement in the Communist party and went to Europe.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Dash shapes, manipulates, and molds the materials herself, as the works becomes something of a physical archive. Through these delicate and time-consuming processes, the artist’s bodily interaction with the material becomes clear, with marks of its making and traces of the artist’s hand embedded in the surface of her quiet compositions.

Photography (Photography)

Modotti’s Diego Rivera Mural: Billionaires Club; Ministry of Education, Mexico D. F., Third Gallery is a photograph of a section of a mural by Diego Rivera in the Ministry of Education in Mexico City. Rivera painted over a hundred frescoes throughout the courtyard of the building, an early mural series that helped revive and popularize the art of mural painting. Modotti, a friend of Rivera’s, took hundreds of photographs of the frescoes which depict divisions of labor in Mexican society.

Photography (Photography)

A photograph of a tin box full of marijuana simply titled Green Box, speaks to the constantly changing status of the substance–once taboo or illicit, now a symbol of a growing industry in Northern California. In the past a photograph of marijuana would more likely be found in an evidence file than an art museum or gallery, but today continued debates about the legality of marijuana and the industry surrounding it has brought the substance into common public view. Green Box is a strong example of the current sociopolitical state of California and the grey areas that exist in legislature and at the same time illustrates the unavoidable commercialization of once underground cultures.

Painting (Painting)

The title of the painting refers to the fact that the figure’s behind is raised upwards and the face is found at the bottom of the painting, thus inverting the way in which people are normally seen. Bottom’s up is also a pun, a nod to the English toast. Quarles draws on a number of sources of inspiration, including comic book imagery, the influence of which sits alongside elements of her practice informed by life drawing classes.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Untitled (rolled up) , is an abstract portrait of Owen Monk, the artist’s father and features an aluminum ring of 56.6 cm in diameter measuring 1.77 cm in circumference, the size of his father. Jonathan Monk bridges a conceptual art and his family privacy, and ironically ensures that there is “no difference between Sol Lewitt and my mother, he does not know more than she do not know. ” What is the status of the O-backed chair rail to the white cube?

Photography (Photography)

Priola pays particular attention to otherwise unnoticed details in the cityscape, a quality that not only recurs throughout his oeuvre, but which also places his work in line with a strong tradition of California documentary photography. Close-ups and attention to detail reveal something different: a portrait of what is usually discarded or missing, like unassuming weep holes in Alameda Street or minuscule weeds making their way up through the pavement in Chestnut Street . But these details are subtle to the point of being conceptual; from afar both images appear to be monochromes.

Textile (Textile)

Designed by the artist and fabricated in collaboration with Kashmiri artisans in India, Baseera Khan’s Psychedelic Prayer Rugs combine visual iconography traditional to Islam, such as the crescent moon and lunar calendar, with brightly coloured symbols of personal significance to the artist: a pair of embroidered sneakers, a fragment of an Urdu poem, and the Purple Heart medal. Visually seductive yet charged with political and symbolic associations, the rugs bridge elements of American popular culture with aspects of Islamic worship that may be poorly understood in contemporary secular contexts. Encouraged by Khan to take their shoes off and interact with the rugs, viewers participate in a decolonizing process as they meditate on their poetic allusions or perform the traditional salat, the daily prayers that constitute one of the five pillars of Islam, the others being faith, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

let this be us is a single-channel video by Richard T. Walker featuring the artist himself roaming around the wilderness of a deserted landscape, sporadically humming a melody, strumming a guitar, or playing a few notes on a keyboard. As he traverses between striking locations we see him carrying large photographic prints of the same landscape that he is treading, which he then rests onto tripods so that the horizon in the photograph seamlessly matches that of the real landscape. As we hear the music, Walker comes in and out of view, dissipating into the landscape as his body becomes invisible, hidden behind the photographic prints.

Photography (Photography)

Ana Roldán’s Primeval forms series looks up close at the fecund shapes of plants often found in the artist’s native Mexico. These botanical portraits, like this one of the Pseudobombax ellipticum, or shaving brush tree, bristle against the edges of the image’s frame, fecund and wild, familiar yet foreign. Ana Roldán works in diverse media such as performance, sculpture, installations, video and collage.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Flight Rehearsals focuses on Subbaiah’s desire to fly as a means to highlight the relationship between human ambition and limitations of the physical world. The video presents philosophical explorations of the human desire to defy gravity and time. The minimalist set of a table highlights the intention and persistence of the protagonist rather than technological innovation.

Installation (Installation)

Solo (2003) is a video exhibited as a video/sound installation depicting shots of drum, voice, guitar, clavier/synthesizer, and a melodica player cut into segmented fragments from the perspective of a studio recording set. Rather than deploying a narrative strategy, Grandmaison focuses on the gestures of the musicians and the repetitions they carry out when recording their individual tracks. The musicians are portrayed nodding, dancing, improvising, strumming, creating resonance that is repeated over and over– however, Grandmaison is sure not to document their entire faces or expressions while they perform, just details.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In his White Discharge series (2002 to today), arguably his best known works, Kaneuji assembles old toys and plastic scarps into dramatic mounded heaps and covers the surface with white plastic resin, drawing on allusions to landfills, commodity fetishism, and creative repurposing. White Discharge (Built-Up Objects #38) (2014) appears playful, like a lost landscape from a whimsical Dr. Seuss story awaiting a charmingly wacky inhabitant. But in drawing its source materials from prefabricated and mass-produced objects, Kaneuji’s work also suggests more trenchant anxieties consumer culture and the rapid and wasteful accumulation that becomes “built-up” in all of our lives.

Installation (Installation)

Ammo Bunker (2009) is a multipart installation that includes large-scale wall prints and an architectural model. The work takes as its departure point the history of Wilmington, Ybarra’s native hometown in southern Los Angeles. The piece refers to a Civil War era ammunition store that Ybarra found at the heart of the harbor close to Long Beach.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Invalid Throne by Jakrawal Nilthamrong is a 35mm film that searches the protagonist Kamjorn Sankwan’s memory and connection with the land he grew up in. Using Nithamrong’s cinematic language of visual representations and soundscapes without narration, he highlights a non-human-centered view to meditate upon and reveal the sublime and unspoiled natural landscape ? as Nilthamrong states: “in the middle of nature where no man has claimed ownership”.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Concerning his objects, Pozarek often relies on chance to guide him. He uses scraps of wood, boxes, hinges and doors, keeping a close eye on what position each object will assume later in the space. Although it suggests the opposite at first glance, Zwillinge is autonomous and functionless.

Performance (Performance)

During the performance A Hand’s Turn visitors are invited to read a text: “I hold a pen with the right hand / move the mouse with the right hand” reads one excerpt. While reading through the instructions the performer’s hands go through a precise choreography. The performance lasts 30 minutes and includes only 2 people at a time.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Unfollow is a music video by Yung Jake featuring a man haunted by the shadows of a former relationship. With the omnipresence of social media in our daily lives, breaking up in the physical world no longer suffices: posts by his ex-lover still appear in his newsfeed, reminding him of her presence and thus making it harder from him to let go of his relationship. As the ‘unfollow’ button on social media appears to be the only way to break up completely, Unfollow underlines the barrier between our online and offline identities and the difficulty to separate them.

Installation (Installation)

Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon by Cici Wu is delicate, but physically much more robust than Cici Wu’s earlier works. What continues is the sense of longing, of something unresolved; it is haunting, like the images from a dream that we try to remember upon waking up. Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon revolves around the story of a developmentally challenged young boy, who purportedly disappeared during the handover of Hong Kong by the British to Chinese governance.

Installation (Installation)

he woke up with seeds in his lungs by Prajakta Potnis is a set of x-ray films presented through backlit light boxes of found objects constructed to evoke the body or organs that turns the host into a foreign element. The title of the work is inspired by a story the artist came across during her research, according to which a man had swallowed seeds that started to grow inside his organs. In the work, interior scapes of the body appear as radioactive rays pass through various materials.

There was a tragedy in Sialkot, Punjab, in August 2010, when two adolescents were murdered by vigilantes who were apparently in connivance with the police. Struck by this blunder revealing police corruption, the started a series of paintings on paper, You who are my love and my life’s enemy too, in which he expressed his reaction to this murder. At first glance the work appears to be a splash of blood like the one in this killing, but, close up, the composition reveals itself as meticulous floral motifs typical of the art of miniature painting which the artist teaches.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Images is a two channel video work addressing the relationship between art and ritual. On the left side, the artist is filmed in a sparse, red room with his tongue nailed onto a red table. With Lim’s freedom of movement and speech limited, the viewer focuses on the facial expressions of the artist as different streams of thoughts and realizations enter his mind.

Photography (Photography)

Kovanda’s street interventions are always documented according to the same format as the actions: a piece of A4 paper, a typewritten text giving a precise location and date, and a photograph. Contrarily to the actions, he took the photographs himself. One of the rules he stuck to in his artistic practice was to always use material at his disposal, a real economy of means.

Photography (Photography)

Kovanda’s street interventions are always documented according to the same format as the actions: a piece of A4 paper, a typewritten text giving a precise location and date, and a photograph. Contrarily to the actions, he took the photographs himself. One of the rules he stuck to in his artistic practice was to always use material at his disposal, a real economy of means.

Photography (Photography)

This series of photographs is part of the body of work Allora & Calzadilla made regarding the situation in Vieques, an island off the mainland of Puerto Rico used for the 60 years by the U. S Military and NATO forces to practice military bombing exercises. In 2000, they began a collaboration with the local activists to make the campaign more visible.

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.