Photography (Photography)

Washington D. C. Constitution Ave. is a silver gelatin print from the series American Surveillance , a ten-year-long project where Richard Gordon photographed surveillance cameras across USA. In the image, a woman and a child walk along Constitutional Avenue as a surveillance camera on the street post directs its gaze towards them. The otherwise quiet image then becomes an exercise of resistance: together with the other images from the series, Gordon’s photograph documents the changes that have taken place in architecture, civic life, especially in a post 9/11 experience of public space.

Photography (Photography)

San Francisco, Moscone Center is a silver gelatin print from the series American Surveillance , a ten-year-long project where Richard Gordon photographed surveillance cameras across USA. In the image’s foreground we see the silhouette of a man, darkened and in contrast to the bright streetscape unfolding behind him. To the left, an American flag flutters in the wind, saluting the skyscrapers—among them the iconic architecture of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action. Also characteristic of his work, the scene takes place in front of a mirror, suggesting the kind of personal self-reflection that one is capable of – both good and evil. The video makes clear cinematographic reference to the ‘alter-ego’ transformation in Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and to the “You looking at me?” sequence performed in front of a mirror by Robert De Niro in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver which also inspired Gordon’s through a looking glass ( 1999).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle. As suggested by the work’s title, each of the hands assumes a character with a distinct personality, as if we were witnessing a lovers’ quarrel and embrace, or the embodiment of opposing forces of an internal struggle. Gordon has previously created performance-based works depicting his own body or parts of it—arms, hands, fingers, eyes—usually enacting simple, repetitive movements.

Photography (Photography)

Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner. An emptiness (some are burned letting appear a white or mirror background or a mirror) replaces the eyes, giving the impression of a blind eye deprived of all expression. Paradoxically, the work looks at us all the more intensely.

Photography (Photography)

The Caste Portraits Series by Leah Gordon investigates the practice of grading skin color from black to white, which marked the extent of racial mixing in 18th century Haiti. Médéric Moreau de St Mery (1750-1819), a French créole slave owner and freemason living in Saint Domingue (now Haiti), created a taxonomy of race classifying skin color from black to white using names derived from mythology, natural history, and bestial miscegenation. His Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (1789) hierarchizes 128 possible combinations of black-white miscegenation into nine categories (the sacatra, the griffe, the marabout, the mulâtre, the quarteron, the métis, the mamelouk, the quarteronné, and the sang-melé).

Painting (Painting)

For Richard Bell, art is not simply a vehicle through which to represent and convey political content. On one hand, art itself has an activist charge—in its very form and presence it can shake up conventional or assumed understandings, opinions, and behaviours. But on the other hand, it is deeply implicated in the actions and attitudes associated with colonialism in Australia and abroad.

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)

In her 2003 series “Better Lives”, Sue Williamson explores stories of immigrants in search of a better life in a historically contentious South Africa. In an attempt to address and confront xenophobia in South African history, Better Lives series subverts racism and prejudice by emphasizing the immigrant as human, and thus gives the subjects a voice. “Better Lives: Richard Belalufu” tells a tale of surviving in a hostile South Africa through the undercurrent reflections on violence, abuse and the difficulty of finding home as an immigrant.

This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006). The video is based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The painting, derived from an image from a different, preexisting work, represents the artist’s continued interest in realizing particular subject matter in alternative forms, thereby imbuing it with new meanings and interpretations.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006). The video is based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket . The painting, derived from an image from a different, preexisting work, represents the artist’s continued interest in realizing particular subject matter in alternative forms, thereby imbuing it with new meanings and interpretations.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Making Fantasies animates scenes based upon photographs by Nan Goldin, Larry Sultan, Richard Billingham, Yasuyoshi Chiba and famous photojournalism images such as Jeff Widener’s photograph of Tiananmen Square and Kevin Carter’s photograph of a Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture. By fabricating narrative and aesthetic connections between the images on three channels, Pei-Shih questions the objectivity and truth telling of photography.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat. In 2006, it was included in the exhibition, Alchemy of Comedy…Stupid at Artpace in San Antonio where Arceneaux explored the links between the medieval practice of alchemy and contemporary comedy. However, his particular image of the wheelchair is tragic, since it refers specifically to the comedian Richard Pryor, who became temporarily wheelchair-bound after being severely burned from drug use, and died prematurely of a heart attack in 2005.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s work brings together spoken and written language, photography, vintage television and computer animation to pay homage to African-American popular culture. Figuration (B) is a mediatic dumpster dive through the not-yet-historical past, its fantasia of purloined images flowing to an interruptive, channel-surfing logic. A stream of TV clips, commercials, news segments, video memes, and movie scenes—at times run backwards, doubled, or layered over other clips—incorporate archival and pop cultural sources layered with a soundtrack constructed of found and made sources to make something akin to a video mixtape.

Photography (Photography)

Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon. Designed by the architect Richard Neutra, its gray glass, white expanses, and simple forms exude austerity. Luisa Lambri’s photograph Untitled (Sten-Frenke House #04) (2007)recalls the unembellished elegance of the structure while also alluding to modernist painting; the image is less a picture than an abstract expanse that conveys its own flatness.

Painting (Painting)

Both Head-Portrait with Red and Blue Background and Man with Blue Tie are classic examples of Weeks’ deftness of line, shape, and color. These two works illustrate his signature flattened style -a vast departure from figurative painting of the time- and hints of influence from modernist painters like Henri Matisse and Maynard Dixon, although with a somewhat darker tone. Both figures stare with with expressionless faces and hollow eyes.

Installation (Installation)

Composed of two rectilinear pieces of glass, this work is part of a series of sculptures started in 2006. These transparent assemblages are in contact with the walls and floor of the exhibition space. The sculptures of this series are the same dimensions with different combinations.

Painting (Painting)

Both Head-Portrait with Red and Blue Background and Man with Blue Tie are classic examples of Weeks’ deftness of line, shape, and color. These two works illustrate his signature flattened style -a vast departure from figurative painting of the time- and hints of influence from modernist painters like Henri Matisse and Maynard Dixon, although with a somewhat darker tone. Both figures stare with with expressionless faces and hollow eyes.

Photography (Photography)

In his work Housing Dreams Walls , the houses photographed are from a closely-knit locale in Kerala – a significant and rapidly popular pattern in this part of the country. The pattern of richly colored and aggressively decorated residences symbolizes prosperity and exudes a sense of security – both financial and social. Although the vocabulary of aesthetics can be termed kitsch, the idea is to understand the underlying expression in the ostentatiously and vibrantly decorated households and giving them some sense of individuality, reflecting their owners’ personalities.

Photography (Photography)

Mohamed Bourouissa’s “ Shoplifters” Series was created in 2014-2015, in a neighborhood supermarket in Lefferts Garden, Brooklyn. The store manager used to take and display Polaroids of thieves caught in the act. In the tradition of appropriation artists –from Marcel Duchamp to Richard Prince– Bourouissa simply reproduced these photographs and transposed them into the field of art to foster questioning.

Photography (Photography)

Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California. Commissioned by industrialist J. Irwin Miller and his wife Xenia Simons Miller, and built by Richard Neutra in 1937, the Miller house’s open and flowing layout expands upon modernist architectural traditions. It features a flat roof, stone and glass walls, with rooms configured beneath a grid pattern of skylights and supporting cruciform steel columns.

Painting (Painting)

White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form. Here, Capistran humorously remixes the form and style of Frank Stella’s Black Paintings with California punk rock band Black Flag’s song title and logo (created by artist Raymond Pettibon). White Minority , then, appropriates, recontextualizes, and riffs on language and visual signs to unmoor notions of identity, power, and revolution.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami. From left to right, each bill is progressively folded up, step by step, into the shape of a gun. Both a scream and a whisper are capable of conveying the same content, if at drastically different decibels, the artist proposes.

Photography (Photography)

The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources. Growing up in an African-American community in Los Angeles, Capistran has long been influenced by hip-hop culture. The photographs in this print document him surreptitiously breakdancing on Carl Andre’s iconic lead floor piece after the guards at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have left the gallery.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The Antique Gem is a collage by Jess comprised of eight fantastical scenes featuring the Cupid as its central protagonist. The title of the work and the oval shape of these scenes, refer to ancient engraved gems, a form of fine art dating back thousands of years B. C. Underneath each of the scenes we can also see lines from a poem, which the artist cut out of the book Gems: Selected from the Antique — a 1804 publication by British painter and illustrator Richard Dagley that is considered an important document for the study of engraved gems and a historical artifact itself. The original poem, as Dagley explains in the publication, is an ancient Greek epigram by Aulus Licinius Archias found engraved in a sardonyx (a variety of rock-forming mineral) gem depicting the figure of Cupid curbing a lion.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Bassoonist

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints. Though simple, each contains a nested stack of historical and self-referential quotations. Both black-and-white prints depict a version of Ligon’s 1988 painting, Untitled (I Am A Man) , which declares the words of the parenthetical in blocky black letters.

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)

This work emphasises Kitty Kraus’s involvement with process, with alchemical transformations associated with Post-Minimalist aesthetics, Arte Povera, Joseph Beuys and Robert Smithson. The loss of form or its dissolution is at the heart of the series of lamps encapsulated in blocs of ice with liquid progressively spreading on the floor. The bulb is embedded in the ice.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Violinist