Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Bodily Study of Unthinking Groups, Harrison combines two disparate materials into one stratified stack: automotive clay (used in detailing cars) forms the earthy base, while fragments of zebra skull become imbedded in this falsified soil. Harrison’s forged archeological artifact compresses two cultural contexts together: that of Africa, represented by the bleached zebra skull; and that of Detroit, the birthplace of the American car. Detroit’s Matthew Angelo Harrison works at the intersection of sculpture and technology, building his own 3D printers (which rise to the status of sculpture), and using these creations to formulate others.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Hole #1 a zebra scull stands in as a representation of Africa, while the plexiglass box and the hole made through it represent the inaccessibility of that culture to African-Americans.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Board has a deadpan quality worthy of Buster Keaton. With this work, Wood and Harrison create an intimate, formally structured mise-en-scène in which they use their own bodies in interaction with a wooden board. The artists elaborate an orchestration of the comic consequences of inertia, gravity, and the law of falling bodies in this low-tech physics experiment.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

One of John Wood and Paul Harrison’s earliest works, Device features Harrison performing a series of actions, assisted by the titular ‘devices’, that use physics to force his body into unusual and uncomfortable positions. Maintaining his signature deadpan expression throughout the video, in one scene Harrison is thrusted into the air by a slowly inflating balloon until only his feet are visible in the frame, while in another he levitates in diving position with the help of a pulley system. Wood uses his body and specially-designed props created by the artist duo to explore the space of the screen in hilarious, and sometimes clumsy or violent, ways.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

3-Legged is an early video work by John Wood and Paul Harrison in which they appear with their legs tied together (as one would do in a three-legged race). Wood and Harrison stand together in a narrow alcove built into their studio, dressed similarly in grey long sleeve shirts and jeans. Facing a tennis ball machine that is almost completely out of view, with only the barrel of the machine protruding from the bottom of the frame, they hobble back and forth across the alcove attempting to avoid the tennis balls launching toward them, with varying degrees of success.

Rachel E. Foster uses printmaking, sculpture, and photography to illuminate the nearly invisible. For her source material she combs the digital world for bits of strange information that seep into our daily reality. These clues, be they coded sequences or simple phrases, become part of her puzzle; by reframing information she makes us reconsider it through a different lens.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

First Born by Rachel Rose is part of a series of works titled Borns which expands on the artist’s longstanding interest in the organic shape of eggs. For this sculpture made of rock and glass the artist has created a milky glass-blown shape, almost like fabric in its form, which is draped over a metallic rock in the shape of an egg. For the artist, the egg is an alchemical symbol that is representative of conception and birth.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

A minute Ago starts with a hailstorm pelting down unexpectedly on a quiet beach in Siberia. People, half naked, run for cover under towels and parasols, to the music of the Pink Floyd. The next scene is an interview of Philip Johnson, filmed 10 years before in the Glass House he constructed.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the 2013 video work, Sitting Feeding Sleeping , Rose combines footage taken of zoo animals living in captivity with screen images that flicker and flash before us. In the narration, Rose talks about forms of life that are suspended and simulated—artificial intelligence and cryogenically frozen bodies, zoo animals and counterfeit ecologies. Through this montage of different types of footage and text, Rose poses us between the natural and the artificial, and speaks to the very strange moment of life in a world that is seemingly caught between the two, existing in a hybrid (though not necessarily symbiotic) moment of radical change.

Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films. Indeed rather surprisingly Kim seems to have had a huge collection of Western videos and he published a book called “On the art of the Cinema” in 1973. As the final acknowledgments indicate, Garcia Torres’s work was produced following in depth research, consulting information given by director Shin Sang-ok who has been kidnapped by Kim in 1978, as well as Jerrold Post (The George Washington University) and Timothy Savage (Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development).