Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pasajes I is the first in a series of Sebastián Díaz Morales’s four videos Pasajes , which focuses on a solitary man walking through Buenos Aires. He walks through churches, shops, and libraries—accessing completely different interior spaces simply by going through doors. The seamless editing allows the man to transcend locations: after he enters a house from a busy intersection he emerges in the halls of a school.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Suspension a young man is hanging in the air, falling, or perhaps drifting through time and space. There is no special or definite way to understand it. And it is in this construction where Morales envisions the world as an endless void, or timeless gravity, that we fall deeper and deeper into our own humanity.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The two works in the Kadist collection, Observador Pasivo and 3600 besos por hora by Diaz are culled from a vast compilation of videos and performances for the camera. These are very successful in transcending the local into the global and/or universal. Memory, surveillance, and the routine and/or familiar, life in terms of both the political life and the social collective life shared by the constant reminder of the shut-off island psychological landscape.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The two works in the Kadist collection, Observador Pasivo and 3600 besos por hora by Diaz are culled from a vast compilation of videos and performances for the camera. These are very successful in transcending the local into the global and/or universal. Memory, surveillance, and the routine and/or familiar, life in terms of both the political life and the social collective life shared by the constant reminder of the shut-off island psychological landscape.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

El neon de los narquitectos

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

There’s Gonna Be Sorrow

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Eamon Ore-Giron’s new commissioned video project Bite Work, is an experimental genre breaking video that is part-performance, part-conceptual and part-comical addressing issues of mediation, surveillance and trust. The main characters in the video wear traditional dance masks of “La Chonguinada” rituals from Peru and attempt to dance while being bitten by trained attacked dogs. Through this act, the dogs simultaneously become sculptural obstacles and dancers.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Hueso de culebra (Snake Bone) arises from the stories that the artist’s grandmother used to tell him as a child about her father’s medical and spiritual practices in the southern part of Costa Rica, close to the border with Panama. One of them revolved around a plant that had various uses, from healing poisonous snake bites to predicting the future. She said, for example, that if one came across this plant during a period of drought, it could mean trouble was coming.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Ship of Fools” is a literary term derived from Sebastian Brant’s 1949 satirical allegory of the same name. The work tells the story of a wandering vessel with 111 fools aboard; each of whom represents a social issue. The Ship of Fools Mooring at the Train Station is a two-channel video work by artist Liu Yu, concerning the community of people residing on the fringes of society at Taipei Main Station.

In this film is the story of two neighboring yet philosophically opposing nations: Russia and Norway. Taken through a love-story of the main character Tanja and her newfound Norwegian husband, the film challenges cultural and social norms of both places through the format of a musical. Dealing with issues of individual in society, family and moral values, Chto Delat entices the audience to consider the nuances of these two contexts.

Painting (Painting)

Untitled (2016) is characteristic of the artist’s practice. Apostolos Georgiou invites us into a scene of cinematic tension. In the foreground, a man is kneeling with his hands on his head.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage. The surfboard, an emblem of Southern California, emblazoned with the image of an eight-ball, references numerous tropes and clichés of American popular culture, specifically subcultures related to pool halls, surfing, and beaches. Indeed, this model-scale surfboard may be a future pop-culture relic, referencing a particular surfer or era of board design.

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.

Painting (Painting)

Hog feed 102 is an exemplary work by Jared Owens that combines two of the artist’s primary signatures: the use of soil smuggled out of the grounds at F. C. I. Fairton, a prison in which Owens was incarcerated, and the stowage diagram of the Brookes slave ship. This diagram from 1788 is a logistical blueprint of how to pack Black bodies efficiently, in tiered serial form, into the hold of a ship. Merging these vocabularies, Owens has laced a burlap sack for pig feed into the work to advance a multi-layered commentary on American prisons as ostensible ‘human farms’ that dehumanize inmates by turning them into a commodity for the prison industrial complex.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

L’effeuillage des effacements (The Stripping of Erasures) 2016, presents a piles of posters gathered in decreasing chronological order from 2015 to 2400 B. C. of 150 historical episodes of debt cancellation (one event per poster). Unlike usual stacks, each poster is different, in its content, but equally in its design (realized by the graphic studio Vier5). As the public takes the posters, the artwork developed into a verified history of cancellation that emerges, a kind of counter-history of indebtedness.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

To explore the boundaries between artwork and audience, Gimhongsok created a series of sculptural performances in which a person wearing an animal costume poses in the gallery. Bunny’s Sofa is a continuation of this series, but with a different twist. Instead of hiring a real person to dress as the animal, Gimhongsok placed a mannequin inside the rabbit costume.

Painting (Painting)

Be Kind to Your Demons is a series of paintings by Hulda Guzmán that presents a variety of scenes in which female characters carry out ubiquitous activities in the company of secondary characters (mostly men) and devil-like creatures. Like much of her work, Be Kind to Your Demons is an invitation to embrace the devil in each of us, to surrender to bodily and external pleasures, and to engage in a conscious dialogue with our own existence. Guzmán’s paintings are a reminder of the brevity, potential intensity, and frailty of human existence.

Installation (Installation)

home, a temporary place by Mithu Sen is part of a project called AºVOID. In this fragmented mental map, the landscape is fleeting, embossed, and ethereal; there are moments of recognition and also a near-violent sudden emptying of memory. Bodies are skeletal, nature is in entropy, context is removed.

Photography (Photography)

Searching for We’wha is composed of five photographic triptychs combining photographs from the American West (New Mexico and Arizona) with excerpts from American Indian poetry in an attempt to reconstruct imaginary aspects of the life of We’Wha, a famous member of the Zuni tribe, who was born male but who lived a feminine gender expression. With this work, Carlos Motta aims to question gender fluidity, indeterminacy, neutrality and non-conformity, using We’wha as an image of the ways in which Two-Spirit American Indians express gender in non-Western non-traditional ways. They are often accepted and revered by their tribes, and in We’wha’s case she even became an official representative of their social interests.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Artist Wong Ping’s madcap video, Wong Ping’s Fables 1 , might at first appear to resemble a crazy screensaver. Grid-like patterns allude to the work’s deep digital structure, while comic-book imagery illustrates a set of curious moral parables. The video tells the story of three flawed characters named Elephant, Chicken, and Tree.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome by Andrew Norman Wilson is a multi-channel video that uses three different imaging technologies—a photographic lens, photorealistic ray tracing animations, and fractal ray-marching animations—to travel through three constructed environments. The work’s subtitle, Lavender Town Syndrome, is named for a conspiracy theory in which more than 200 Japanese children were driven to suicide by a particular board in the game Pokémon Red and Green for Game Boy. Many others suffered serious migraines or nosebleeds, or turned violent when their parents tried to take the game away.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Combined into a single two-channel HD video, Li Xiaofei’s Ponytail and Chongming Island II are silent portraits of the women assembly line workers at a Chinese kitchenware factory. Close-up shots of women’s heads—most notably of the rear with their hair in the similar updo fashion—and faces occupy the frame amidst a backdrop of a revolving steel conveyor. In lieu of dialogue or humming of the machinery, a ringing score of chimes and bells provides a tranquil soundtrack.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Note on Multitude is a chilling black-and-white short movie recorded with a single camera in Prishtina, Kosovo, in 2015. The film, beginning in an unidentifiable location, shows a large, bustling and anxious crowd. Soon, the viewer is privy to the setting: a bus station.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

On the first day of the Covid-19 lockdown in New York, Andrew Norman Wilson was evicted from his sublet and decided to board a $30 flight to Los Angeles that evening. From a cottage that faces the Hollywood sign, he began to dwell on an encounter he had with a woman driving alongside him on the highway, emphatically singing along to the song he was listening to through the same radio station. That song was Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” For Wilson, the uncanny synchronicity of this encounter with a stranger tuned into the same frequency resonated with the inspiration for Phil’s song, which he first heard as a teenager while getting high in a friend’s basement.

Installation (Installation)

wombmate! by Mithu Sen is part of a project called AºVOID. In this fragmented mental map, the landscape is fleeting, embossed, and ethereal; there are moments of recognition and also a near-violent sudden emptying of memory.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Andrew Norman Wilson’s work Kodak the artist uses computer-generated imagery to create narratives that question the reliability of images in the age of post-production. The artist creates disturbances in typical notions of time and space to highlight the existential terror of humans trying to make sense of their memories and perception in the 21st century. On its surface, Kodak questions how improvements in digital imagery have affected the analog film industry, but it also showcases the consequences for how humans relate to their memories.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Chase ATM emitting blue smoke, Bank of America ATM emitting red smoke, TD Bank ATM emitting green smoke was shot in the American Southwest at Mid-century modern architectural structures that were built to house regional independent banks and have since been bought up by Chase, Bank of America, and TD Bank. The video utilizes transparency and opacity effects in multimedia software to question the perceptibility of finance. It offers a complex metaphor (toxic assets, emergency flares, house/mortgage on fire) about the financial sector and the effects of the ‘crisis’ that led to the disappearance (and the ghostly memory) of many local and regional banks.