Arpedia

A painting reminiscent of a certain “naive primitivism,” Untitled (the way in is the way out) is representative of McCarthy’s work. Upon first encounter, her abstract colorful compositions resemble somewhat formal nonrepresentational landscapes. However, a closer inspection reveals the presence of a lowbrow style that draws inspiration both from outsider and folk art traditions.

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Apartment on Cardboard

Chris Johanson

Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building. Viewers unwittingly become voyeurs, peering through the rectangles that stand for windows and observing the residents therein, who ponder questions both mundane and existential: “Where is Ron now?” and “What have I become?” The queries and characters are treated democratically—not judged, praised, or subjected to hierarchy. While their thoughts are specific, the painting captures a universal urban activity: looking across to the building next door and wondering about its residents, all the while knowing that they have probably looked over and wondered about us, as well.

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I am Human, Abstract Foil, No Humans IV

Chris Johanson

Chris Johanson’s paintings, sculptures, and installations break down everyday scenes and commonplace dramas into colorful forms; the darkest sides of humanity are invoked with humor. The works comment on subjects such as capitalism, consumerism, the art world, and therapy. The triptych I Am a Human, Abstract Foil, No Humans IV (2004) is a meditation on the cosmos.

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Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat)

Chris Johanson

Chris Johanson’s Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat) (2010) pictures a canoe drifting toward an off-kilter horizon line, which demarcates the cobalt sea from the cerulean sky. An orange-haired figure, oar positioned in mid-stroke, looks ahead—whether toward an edge or an infinite expanse, it is impossible to tell. Echoing a trope that recurs in Greek epic poetry, transcendental painting, and current-day reality television, the character is alone with nature.

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Undocumented Intervention

Julio Cesar Morales

Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation. Morales drew inspiration from both his childhood near the United States-Mexico border as well as from photographic documentation on U. S. government websites.

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There’s Gonna Be Sorrow

Julio Cesar Morales

Sculpture (Sculpture)

There’s Gonna Be Sorrow

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Interrupted Passage

Julio Cesar Morales

The video Interrupted Passage presents a performance Morales staged in the former home of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a mid-nineteenth-century Mexican general serving in California. Reenacted here is Vallejo’s acquiescence to Americans who were attempting to overthrow Mexican governance of the region. When a small militia arrived at Vallejo’s house to arrest him, he invited them in and shared a meal.

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Contrabando

Julio Cesar Morales

Contrabando is a work that references the larger sociological phenomenon in which immigrant economic strategies come to infiltrate urban landscapes. It is a study of the realities and consequences of exploited labor that simultaneously aims to record the living history of labor.

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El neon de los narquitectos

Julio Cesar Morales

Sculpture (Sculpture)

El neon de los narquitectos

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27 Punk Photos: 11. Dim Wanker: F Word, May, 1978

Bruce Conner

In 1977, as an already-established artist best known for his films, Bruce Conner began to photograph punk rock shows at Mabuhay Gardens, a San Francisco club and music venue. 27 Punk Photos: 11. Dim Wanker: F Word, May, 1978 (1978) is representative of a series of photographs by Conner, whose subject became a fascination for the artist.

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VertiGhost

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco. VertiGhost features the re-creation of select scenes from Vertigo (which takes place in San Francisco), documentation of the life of a painting by Amedeo Modigliani in the Legion of Honor’s collection that was enshrouded by questions of authenticity, as well as interviews—including with the original film’s star Kim Novak— about the construction of realities in life and art. By thoughtfully overlaying these conversations and events, Hershman Leeson distills complex conversations around identity and authenticity into concise insights in just over 12 minutes.

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Borrando la Frontera

Ana Teresa Fernández

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.

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Untitled (San Francisco)

Edward Kienholz

Installation (Installation)

Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name. Assembled from the remnants and found objects from a hotel room, including a collage, shelf and small lamp, this playful piece—a satirical shrine of sorts—echoes the decidedly un-modern spirit of San Francisco’s bohemian culture. Kienholz’s works, with their critical and anti-establishment content, are often linked to the 1960s Funk Art movement in the Bay Area.

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San Francisco, Moscone Center

Richard Gordon

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.

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Untitled 3737 and Untitled 5157

Todd Hido

The two pieces in the Kadist Collection depict foggy landscapes, one at dawn, the other at nighttime. Both dimly lit scenes are dominated by an eerie feeling. Taken by a road, these painterly photographs suggest the uncanny character of the transient.

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From the North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge San Francisco and Nob Hill San Francisco

John Gutmann

Gutmann’s photographs Untitled Nob Hill and From the North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge are some of the oldest pieces in the Kadist Collection and serve as historical anchors for many of the more recent works. Distinctly modernist in style, the photos depict two of San Francisco’s most recognizable sites—the affluent neighborhood of Nob Hill and the iconic Golden Gate Bridge—through extremely estranged angles and balanced compositions. Moreover, these two images are representative of Gutmann’s work inasmuch as they epitomize two of the photographer’s visual obsessions: the automobile and the city of San Francisco.

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Sketches from train ride Chicago to San Francisco

Lam Tung Pang

Lam Tung Pang created Sketches from train ride Chicago to San Francisco during his travels through the United States researching American curatorial strategies for representing traditional Chinese painting in museums and cultural institutions. The drawings incorporate both traditional and contemporary Chinese landscape techniques to reflect on the memory, history, and aesthetic practices of the Chinese laborers who played a prominent role in the American westward expansion. By representing the Western landscape according to Chinese aesthetics, Lam calls attention to the distortions and cultural specificity of American representations of the Western landscape and non-Western cultures.

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Fedex® 10kg Box 2006 FedEx 149801 REV 9/06 MP, Standard Overnight, Los Angeles-San Francisco, trk#800983717740, December 18-19, 2012, International Priority, San Francisco-Beijing, trk# 775046700145, October 27-November 5, 2021

Walead Beshty

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination. Displayed with the cardboard boxes (and their shipping labels, which chart the journey in a different way) that contain them during the journey, these damaged forms draw from minimalist sculpture, and conceptual artworks that focused on distance, travel, and virtual connections.

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Digger Dug

Ben Kinmont

The archive proposes to examine the difference between helping others in the context of an artistic project and in the context of social work in order to question authorship. The first part of Digger Dug made in 2004 was reactivated during the Kadist exhibition, for instance as an exchange with an anthropologist concerning ethics in projects that are both artistic and social. Thus the archive contained a new text and a series of photographs, videos and notes made during the exhibition.

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Human Quarry

Leslie Shows

Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage. Both through its title and formally—through how the shapes in the composition resemble a mountain or natural formation—the piece relays us to a mineral quarry or a deep mining pit where materials are extracted. Interspersed among the block-like figures and rocky textures, we also see several human silhouettes, either cut-out, or as if they were whited out by a shining light, or lost in the shadows.

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Serengeti Green

Phillip Maisel

While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves. Elements used in various stages of photographic processes (color filters, glassine, and prints themselves) are integrated back into the artwork either as part of the sculpture or as collage elements that are later added to the print. In some of the works, Maisel cuts into the prints themselves.

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Untitled (Men)

Matt Lipps

In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form. For Untitled (Men) (2011), he snipped from magazines and textbooks pictures of handsome or famous men, from the ancient Greek to the modern. Arranged in a tableau, lit theatrically, and rephotographed, the two-dimensional figures have an embodied presence.

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EASTER MORNING

Bruce Conner

Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience. The video presents us with a reinterpretation of footage from his unreleased avant-garde film, Easter Morning Raga , from 1966. In contrast to his more famous pieces like A Movie (1958) and Crossroads (1976) which are juxtapositions of fragments from newsreels, soft-core pornography, and B movies, the images in EASTER MORNING serve as a reinterpretation of footage.

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Color of History, Sweating Rocks

Ranu Mukherjee

Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining.

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Sirens

Paul Kos

Taking its title from the eponymous mythological creature—famously featured as sea nymphs in Homer’s Odyssey. Sirens exist in literature across many cultures including Ancient Greece and India, described as part bird and part woman, or like a mermaid. They were said to charm men by their song, and, having first lulled them to sleep, tear them to pieces.

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The Simpson Verdict

Kota Ezawa