Arpedia

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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The Golden State

William E. Jones

His series, The Golden State, harkens back to his early career and his photographic training. Using a still camera to compose the fifty images of the series, Jones turns his lens on the vernacular architecture of California’s southern region, looking at the iconic and idiosyncratic spaces that define a region. William E. Jones is a filmmaker, writer, and artist whose interests lie in the circulation of images—images that are broadcast, images that are hidden, and images that become imbedded in our collective consciousness.

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One Universe, One God, One Nation

Yin-Ju Chen

One Universe, One God, One Nation was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s analysis of space exploration and by the astrological horoscope of Chinese political and military leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975). Chiang was born with the sun in Scorpio and at the Ninth House, moon in Aries, and ascendant in Capricorn, signifying an individual who is headstrong, intense, and persistent, with a desire for leadership. Yin-Ju juxtaposes images of outer space, war, and subservient masses, calling attention to how the dictator’s violence and charismatic power over the crowd was predicted by his particular astrology.

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Extrastellar Evaluations III: Entropy: 25800

Yin-Ju Chen

Extrastellar Evaluations is a multimedia installation produced during Yin-Ju Chen’s residency at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2016. Chen’s project departs from a 19th century theory popular within Western biogeography that posited the existence of a “lost land” or ancient continent called Lemuria that had sunk beneath the Indian and Pacific Ocean due to cataclysmic geological change. As a result, its inhabitants, the Lemurians, found refuge in Mount Shasta, California.

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Extrastellar Evaluations

Yin-Ju Chen

Through a semi-fictional approach, Extrastellar Evaluations envisions a version of history in which alien inhabitants, the Lemurians, lived among humans under the guise of various renowned conceptual and minimal artists in the 1960s (Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, and James Turrell to name a few). If humans interpreted and appropriated the geometric-shaped works they created as conceptual and minimalist artworks, the objects were in fact transmission devices the Lemurians used to report back on human actions to their mother planet. The video takes the form of a channeled message from Adama, High Priest and spiritual leader of the Lemurians.

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Spaceship sketches of The Lemurian

Yin-Ju Chen

This work includes sketches for Extrastellar Evaluations , the project she produced at Kadist. Extrastellar Evaluations introduces Plato’s mythical state of Atlantis as the theoretical birthplace of conceptual art. Well-known and obscure epistemological notions from the annals of cosmology and mysticism guided and informed her research in the Bay Area during the Kadist residency at the beginning of 2016.

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American Flag (Scratch)

Collier Schorr

Collier Schorr’s prints upend conventions of portrait photography by challenging what it means to “document” a subject. American Flag (Scratch) (1999), for example, depicts an unidentified male subject clad in an American flag-print singlet. With his head and extremities out of frame, the camera focuses on his flush-red torso, his left nipple protruding from the singlet’s strap.

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Holly Golightly

Jason Meadows

Titled afterTruman Capote’s protagonist famously played by Audrey Hepburn in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Holly Golightly (2011) captures the essence of the character: seductive and bold, mysterious and capricious. Though tied to the ceiling by a chain, the suggested figure is literally light on her feet, with a pointed boot hovering just above the gallery floor. Non-parallel lines and inconsistent angles lend the sculpture a sense of airy haphazardness.

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In the Collage II (Marie)

Collier Schorr

In the Collage II (Marie) (2013), Shorr seems to have an ostensibly clear subject, a female subject identified in the work’s title as “Marie,” a slim but athletic woman with brown hair pictured reclining atop a brilliantly white sheet draped against a marbled tan-and-white backdrop. Although photographed topless, Marie is depicted in slightly contorted poses that emphasize the curves of her figure while also obstructing the viewer’s gaze. Printed on high gloss paper, Marie’s portrait has the polished veneer of magazine spread, and the two portraits on display offer different vantages of the same subject.

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Restaurant, Canton, Ohio

William E. Jones

In Restaurant, Canton, Ohio (2011), a convenience store offers food, liquor, and Coca Cola to an empty street. A series of boarded-up storefronts marred by peeling paint conveys a sense of the pre- or post-apocalyptic—the hush just before or after a disaster. The reds, pinks, and oranges of the buildings give off warmth, but the absence of human activity makes the glow eerie and strange.

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Killed

William E. Jones

Killed is a video projection in which William E. Jones appropriated and edited, in a rapid sequence, a selection from the more than 68,000 censored or discarded films produced by the Farm Security Administration’s photographers between 1935 and 1943. Roy Emerson Stryker, the then director of the program, was in charge of what he called “killing” negatives by punching holes in them to render them unusable. Killed continues Jones’s use of discarded film footage seen in his video created from vintage 1970s and 1980s gay porn that was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

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Horizontal Striation Scrap Lamp and Vertical Striation Scrap Lamp

Jason Meadows

The Striation Scrap Lamps (vertical and horizontal) although functioning as utilitarian objects also represent Jason Meadows’s interest in a certain kind of crafted sculpture. In fact, one could go as far as to say that these pieces connect with different lines running through the 101 collection: they combine both the appropriation of found materials that responds to a very common practice in certain forms of West Coast avant-garde with an interest in the intersection of art and design (something that is present to a certain extent in more slick, design-oriented pieces such as Chadwick Rantanen’s Telescopic Poles for example).

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Donald of Doom Tank

Kristen Morgin

Donald of Doom Tank (2008) is a replica of a vintage metal toy with Donald Duck’s image one side and a soldier on the other. During World War II, the Walt Disney Company produced series of cartoon shorts that featured Donald Duck’s nightmare of working in an inhumane artillery factory in Nazi Germany and serving in the U. S. Army. By animating and normalizing war and military life, these cartoons not only achieved widespread popularity, but functioned as government propaganda.

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Jeep Comics

Kristen Morgin

Jeep Comics is based on the second of only two issues published by RB Leffingwell and Company in 1944–45. Though largely unknown, their protagonists, Jeep and Peep, embody the ethos of “Golden Age” comic books in which magically empowered heroes triumph over evils to boost patriotic enthusiasm.

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Do Not Pass Go

Jason Meadows

Jason Meadows’s Do Not Pass Go (2011) depicts Richie Rich, “the poor little rich boy” of the 1950s comic strip. As his steel outline gleefully makes off with a bag of money and a stack of bills, another icon of affluent America, Uncle Pennybags (otherwise known as the Monopoly Man), is crushed underfoot between two heavy blocks. Behind them lies a broken piggy bank, depicted upside down with eyes X-ed out.

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The six grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the year 502 002

Matthew Buckingham

Installation (Installation)

Matthew Buckingham presents a narrative directly connected with a highly symbolic site in the United States, the Mount Rushmore Memorial*. He elaborates a historiographic narrative of this place and switches it into the domain of science fiction by proposing a photograph of the Memorial as it should appear in 500 000 years. The effigies of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt become unrecognizable.

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Black Star Press

Kelley Walker

Painting (Painting)

The triptych Black Star Press is part of the series ‘The Black Star Press project’ initiated in 2004 by the American artist Kelley Walker. The images in this series are taken from a photo essay on the struggle for civil rights in Alabama, directed by Charles Moore in 1962 (and published by the magazine ‘Life’) which showed the repression of the black population and persistent inequalities in the southern United States. The title “Black Star Press” is taken from the name of the news agency where Charles Moore worked, and it refers to the young black man shot fighting for the rights of his community.

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Collectors’ Favorites

Jennifer Bornstein

Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos. When it comes her turn to “perform,” Bornstein displays mundane and disposable—but elaborately archived or framed—consumer objects such as coffee lids, plastic straws, candy wrappers, and product labels. Through the medium of public broadcasting, then, she makes visual the frequently overlooked but massive cultural penetration of advertising, and its proliferation of “throwaway culture” via images.

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Untitled (Zimbabwe)

Fred Wilson

Painting (Painting)

Fred Wilson’s flag paintings document the 20th century history of African people, indexing the period of liberation from colonialism. As the majority of African flags were created during the 1950s and 60s, they were intended to reflect a so-called ‘modern’ aesthetic and ideology. Many African flags maintain the typical flag tropes such as stripes, stars, birds, and blocks of primary and secondary colors; green to represent the land; blue to symbolize the ocean or sky; and red to recall the violence that occured in the pursuit of liberty.

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Untitled (Details from fictional realities)

Matt Mullican

Mullican’s Stick Figure Drawings depict characters reduced to their most basic graphic representation. Glen is a simple silhouette, genderless and inspired by a found photo of a crime scene, in whom we recognize the generic sign of the universal symbol of a self-portrait. Mullican continually projects himself, sometimes physically, into the silhouette that he has created, allowing the artist to pass from one reality to another.

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2016 in Museums, Moneys, and Politics

Andrea Fraser

The year 2016 is organized like a telephone book; the data corresponding to the contributions are classified in alphabetical order by the name of the donor. With this database as well as other types of information, the 900-page book presents a material representation of the scale of the cross over between cultural philanthropy and the financing of political campaigns in America. It also provides an unprecedented resource for discovering the political leaning of the museum sector.

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NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, Mastic Beach, New York, United States

Trevor Paglen

NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, Mastic Beach, New York, United States

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Itch

Yang Guangnan

Itch explores the relationship between technology and daily human experience with a motorized arm that extends from within the gallery’s wall, moving up and down while holding a projector that shows a desperately scratching pair of hands.

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Action No.1

Yang Guangnan

Installation (Installation)

In Action no. 1 Yang Guangnan reflects on the interiority and exteriority of human-technological experience with mechanical gestures that are semi-human and semi-machine. A hanged shirt mounted upon the artist’s machine rhythmically bounces and rotates in a way that suggests a skeletal interior.

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Wagon Wheel

Toby Ziegler

Wagon Wheel is a work with a fundamental dynamism that derives both from the rotating movement of the elements suspended on poles and the kicking of the legs of the figure. It is based on a pornographic image by Giulio Romano (ca.1499-1546). Romano had completed Raphael’s frescos in the Vatican after the latter’s death but was not paid for the work.

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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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A Thoughtful Gift

Pio Abad

A Thoughtful Gift by Pio Abad is based on a version of a letter written by the former First Lady of the United States, Nancy Reagan to the former First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos. Written in 1986, the letter assures Marcos of their safety from persecution in the United States, following widespread anti-government protests across the Philippines. The Marcoses were granted exile in the United States by the Reagan administration and they eventually fled to Honolulu.

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The American War

Harrell Fletcher

The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history. The project began in 2005 when Fletcher visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. He was shocked by images that depicted the lasting effects of the war and the atrocities committed by the United States.

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Destilaciones

Ximena Garrido Lecca