Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ken Okiishi’s work Being and/or Time consists of every image taken with Okiishi’s iPhone over the period of three years in his hometown of New York. Flickering in chronological order at 24 images per second with 25,000 images in total. A visual diary of the digital age it simultaneously stages the city itself as a time-­image continuously remade by its own resident-­users.

Photography (Photography)

The threshold in contemporary Pakistan between the security of private life and the increasingly violent and unpredictable public sphere is represented in Abidi’s 2009 series Karachi . These staged photographs were shot against the backdrop of the city’s empty streets at sundown during the holy month of Ramadan. During this time, Muslims fast and retreat indoors, leaving the city eerily empty.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Takeshi Murata developed an interest in space inspired by his architect parents. OM Rider features the artist’s characteristic absurdist humor and aesthetics–a mélange of highly attuned lighting and composition (in homage to Ken Price), with retro modeling and minimalist, almost antiseptic spaces.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Yu Honglei’s video and mixed media works riff on familiar motifs from the Western art historical canon and reimagine them through a playful but subversive culture jamming of their original meaning. Life (2013), for example, depicts a tiled backdrop of various images and stills associated with the work of American Pop artist Andy Warhol. Digital reproductions of his silkscreens featuring public figures like Elizabeth Taylor, Chairman Mao, and Debbie Harry form an amalgamation of modern art iconography, while repeated images of Warhol himself serve as a constant reminder that even after his death, the artist is still decidedly present in our art historical consciousness.

Photography (Photography)

Vandy Rattana’s Bomb Ponds series was made following a transformative encounter with the craters left over from 2,756,941 tons of bombs dropped by U. S. forces during the Vietnam War between 1964 and 1973. Dissatisfied with the level of documentation on the bombing and its repercussions, the artist began to study the historiography of his country. He travelled to the ten most severely bombed provinces, engaging villagers in locating and testifying to the existence of the craters, and how they are lived with today.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Talking Head is a short film in black and white of Auder’s daughter Alexandra, hidden behind a hemp plant, playing with a plastic wrapper and babbling in an imaginative way. The viewer is uncertain whether Alexandra knows she is being filmed but given that Auder was constantly filming she was probably oblivious to it. Her statements make little sense to the outsider : ‘The thing never came back again.

Photography (Photography)

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. The photograph is framed upside down; these “inverted trees” follow Graham’s early experiments with the camera lucida, a room-size pinhole camera that dates back to ancient times. Through these works Graham looks back at the history of photography while making the viewer aware of his or her own retinal experience.

Photography (Photography)

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. The photograph is framed upside down; these “inverted trees” follow Graham’s early experiments with the camera lucida, a room-sized pinhole camera that dates back to ancient times and which he has used to photograph trees from various regions. Through these works Graham looks back at the history of photography while making the viewers aware of their own retinal experience.

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.

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 otherwise banal scissors become suggestively violent in relation to the text, which was originally the title of a print in Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War series. However, Baldessari is less interested in the logical relationships between text and image than he is with the conceptual leaps that the viewer makes with the limited information provided.

Photography (Photography)

Arms & Legs (Specif. Elbows & Knees), etc. : Arm (with Bottle) belongs to Baldessari’s most recent series of paintings in which the artist brings together photographic, painted, and three-dimensional elements, to juxtapose unlikely body fragments such as noses and ears, elbows and knees, or eyebrows and foreheads.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive. In Person with Pillow: Desire, Lust, Fate , a woman’s facial expression is obscured by such void, leaving only her posture to suggest her emotional state. The two images stacked above the woman can be read as comic-style thought bubbles, intimating that she has lust, desire, and fate on her mind.