Photography (Photography)

LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel. His photograph of this throwaway object calls back the body, and the handprint is in fact his own right hand; thus the piece can function as a self-portrait of the artist, in an ironic twist on the art historical genre.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Long Long Live (2013) takes the viewer to the setting of the Oasis Villa on Green Island, once a reform and re-education prison to house political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period. In black and white, Yao depicts the historical site as an eerie abandoned compound. Reflecting on the centenary of the HsinHai Revolution and the end of the Cold War, Yao questions the existence of an ever lasting dynasty or “transcendental Rules of History.” The soundtrack features a sole voice reverberating through loud speakers.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Kan Xuan’s four-channel video Island , a series of objects like nail clippers, hairbrush, toothpaste, and house decorations are shot in close-ups. These highly polished and aestheticized images create a poetic visual flow. However, in front of each object lies a coin of different value—two yuan, one pound, one euro, one dollar—that silently reveals the material value of the household supplies.

Photography (Photography)

Dorsky’s pieces included in the Kadist Collection are small still photographs from twelve of his most important films. Here, the still images function in the same way as his cinematographic work: Highly aesthetic, they allow for the appearance of intricate visual patterns and layers of meaning that take scenes of everyday life as its source material. Both Dorsky’s cinematic and photographic works follow a stream of consciousness that rejects representation or fixed narrative structure.

Painting (Painting)

It may take a minute to recognize the background of New Fall Lineup – the colors are tweaked into a world of cartoon and candy, and it is covered by leaping energetic figures and flying squirrels. One realizes, though, that the image is of the World Trade Center exploding into flame, creating a strange contrast with the painting’s colors and the other images. The combination is peculiar because the role the explosion serves here is non-specific.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment. However, Kirk’s passive pose doesn’t so much suggest the aftermath of a battle as it does heavy contemplation, depression, or utter despair. Captain X is part of a series of paintings depicting various Star Trek characters who are stricken with human emotion-—a tactic that diminishes the mythological grandeur associated with this heroic captain and his indefatigable crew.

Painting (Painting)

Conrad Ruiz loves to paint subjects related to the “boy zone”: video games, weapons, games, science fiction, fantasy, and special effects. He also often works at a very large scale to emphasize a connection to the tradition of history painting. Blockbuster (2011) was, at the time of its creation, the largest watercolor painting he had ever made.

Painting (Painting)

Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds. These portraits explore the relationship between the psyche and contemporary social environments, focusing on isolation, identity, and distress. The figure in Alignment slouches with his head in his hands in a gesture of failure or despair, speaking to the difficult task of balancing individual freedom and societal rules.

Photography (Photography)

Baby Shoes, Never Worn is part of photographer John Houck’s series of restrained still-life photographs capturing objects from his childhood. The image depicts a box, addressed to the artist’s mother, that once contained—it can be assumed—baby shoes. Houck layers the photograph with multiple exposures, lending an uneasy tripling effect to the static object.

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.

Photography (Photography)

Untitled #275_06, 2 colors, #FF8F89, #9E7A8F

Photography (Photography)

John Houck’s multi-layered photographic compositions immortalize nostalgic objects from the artist’s childhood, manipulated in the studio and in post-production into unreal still-life arrangements. Stamp -X, Stamp -Y consists of a careful collage of uneven scraps of paper. On their versos, these fragments of blue, white, and manila papers hold the artist’s childhood stamp collection; turned as they are, these shards of envelope become planes of colors that Houck manipulates in a vaguely grid-like fashion.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico. I painted them sky blue, creating a “Hole in the Wall” This deconstruction of “feminized” work explores the difficulties in reconciling both low wages and undervalued work via social and political infrastructures, confronting issues of labor and power. The images that I myself perform, present a duality: women dressed in a black tango dance attire while engaging in de-skilled domestic chores; the surreal within non-fiction.

Painting (Painting)

Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds. These portraits explore the relationship between the psyche and contemporary social environments, focusing on isolation, identity, and distress. Central Station shows a character reaching to wipe a tear from her face as the blues of her wardrobe seem to blend in with the dismal blue of the background.

Painting (Painting)

Central Station, Alignment, and Argument are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds. These portraits explore the relationship between the psyche and contemporary social environments, focusing on isolation, identity, and distress. The two characters in Argument interact in an ambiguous gesture of conflict or embrace as the world around them pulsates in agitated waves.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Last Postcards is a series of three small double-sided paintings on plywood in which Biernoff imagines the last communications from explorers lost in the wilderness. Biernoff’s choice of Everett Ruess, Percy Fawcett, and the conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader is particularly telling. On one level, the Last Postcards analogize the nineteenth-century explorer with the contemporary artist who looks for purpose in their work.

Photography (Photography)

Houck’s Peg and John was made as part of a series of photographic works that capture objects from the artist’s childhood. In this image, drafting materials (pencils, compasses, and protractors) are laid out next to shotgun shell casings. Presenting these objects in juxtaposition but without commentary, Houck offers a partial but interesting glimpse into his own biography.

Photography (Photography)

Untitled #242 is part of Houck’s Aggregates Series, which uses digital tools to manipulate chosen sets and pairs of colors, creating colorful index sheets, bathed in colors and lines. Houck transforms these simple outputs physically, folding, lighting, photographing, and re-printing them, only to fold, photograph, and re-print again. An MFA graduate from UCLA, John Houck works primarily in the medium of photography and specializes in still-life vignettes.

Installation (Installation)

In her recent work, Biernoff is interested in investigating fictions and fantasies embedded in the remnants of consumer culture (for example magazines) or through ephemera such as postcards and old photographs. Although the imagery present in her work might seem nostalgic upon first encounter, Biernoff’s complex tableaux often reveal the artist’s skeptical look towards her subjects matters. They Were Here (2010), constitutes a clear example.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Flesh in Stone – Ghost No. 1 is a stunning series of cement made body parts in various scales and movements, along with components such as iron and plaster molds to emphasize their tension. The “incompleteness” of Flesh in Stone weakens the figurative image itself, thus shifting the viewer’s focus onto the relationship between the rough material and the ideal rounded body shapes.

Painting (Painting)

Like the film Le Mouton noir, this dimension is counterbalanced by a burlesque element. The piece of fabric on the rat’s paw or ‘graft’ becomes a patchwork made out of colorful geometric shapes recalling a Harlequin costume, thus referring directly to the burlesque tradition. This leitmotiv creates a contrast with the dull colors, the humility of the countryside, and makes the figurative scene look unreal to reveal its superficiality.

Painting (Painting)

Arima’s free brushstrokes gesture towards traditions in Expressionist painting. As with the acrylic painting Ticket (also 2015), Person in Red Sweater could be seen as an attempt at “pure painting” in which the aesthetics of the medium supersede content. But if his portraits resist social commentary, they nonetheless challenge conventional standards of beauty through a decided embrace of decayed forms and colors.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Oren Pinhassi’s work examines the relationship between the human figure and the built environment. His hybrid sculptures, often somewhat emaciated, hover between the figurative and the architectural. In the case of The Crowd , a series of sculptures which evince architectures of control – where humans act and exert power – we find voting booths, segregation cells, institutional desks, places where bureaucratic exchange become spaces of bodily desire, complete with sexual appendages.

Painting (Painting)

The depiction of the female figure in the sculptures remains an economic, canny composition of geometric abstractions in a Modernist spirit. Yet rather than provide us with the layers of information found in her wall reliefs, the sculptures exclusively frame space. In place of the tactile surfaces that can be carved into and drawn on, the sculptures’ outlines provide multiple perspectives on to their surroundings, and additionally unto themselves.

Painting (Painting)

Arima’s free brushstrokes gesture towards traditions in Expressionist painting, and Ticket could be seen as an attempt at “pure painting” in which the aesthetics of the medium supersede content. But if his portraits resist social commentary, they nonetheless challenge conventional standards of beauty through a decided embrace of decayed forms and colors. Inspired by underground creative cultures, his paintings have the slipshod spontaneity of graffiti and other types of street art.

Installation (Installation)

The neon sign Walk the Walk (Sam Durant) overlays a Walk/Don’t Walk Sign crosswalk sign onto the text “You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect.” The sign asks viewers to not walk on Indigenous lands without respecting it, and, switching between a walking person icon in white and a raised hand icon in red, redirects their actions. This work by Native Art Department International signals a reminder that we–the audience and institution–are located on and occupy traditional territories. The work appropriates and twists white artist Sam Durant’s You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect (2008) in response to his work Scaffold (2012) installed in 2016-7 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

“School of the seven Bells (SOTSB)” is based on a series of hands games in which an object is passed from hand to hand. The performance is a reference to the film by Robert Bresson, “Pickpocket”, where a group of pickpocketers play with their victims. The artwork, through the actions of the hands, is an interrogation into space and time, questioning the relationship between public and private space, the establishment of communication through the body and visual exchange and gestures between aggression and sensuality.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Fauna is a figurative sculpture by Auriea Harvey that is characteristic of the artist’s practice—both serious and somewhat whimsical. Making use of old and new technologies, the work is a self-portrait. The sculpture features a soft and gentle human face made of 3D printed composite, sprouting from a clutter of clay and other materials.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A Splinter (Study for Painting) is a large graphite work on paper by Hernan Bas that was intended as a study for a later painting. The composition features three unfinished figures, all of whom appear to be observing something unrendered or external to the picture plane. Around the group of figures roughly framed by the outline of a triangle, is a frenzy of loose marks and smudged lines that juxtapose the delicate features of the figures’ faces.

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.