Arpedia

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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Espectacular cortina

Pia Camil

Camil has made numerous paintings and photographs of halted projects along Mexico’s highways (she calls them “highway follies”), and of abandoned billboards that look like theater curtains dramatizing failed capitalist strategies. (Espectacular, the colloquial Spanish term for “billboard,” also translates more literally as “spectacle,” and of course recalls Guy Debord’s famous 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle .) In Mexico, the urban landscape has been taken over by billboards; they are totally integrated into the landscape.

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Freeway Series

Catherine Opie

Although best known as a provocateur and portraitist, Opie also photographs landscapes, cityscapes, and architecture. The Freeway Series was developed in 1995, right after the artist’s inclusion in that year’s Whitney Biennial. As if suggesting that her work should not be restricted to being seen through overtly political or activist lenses, this series lends insight into the city of Los Angeles via its most characteristic urban feature: its highways.

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PANGKIS

Yee I-Lann

PANGKIS by Yee I-Lann is a looped video performance. The work is named after the triumphant warrior cry, an animistic guttural call, which punctuates the traditional Dusun Sumazau dance. For this work, the artist collaborated with Tagaps Dance Theatre, a group of young dancers whose practice merges traditional and contemporary styles.

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Studio Construct 51

Barbara Kasten

Barbara Kasten’s Studio Construct 51 depicts an abstract still life: a greyscale photograph of clear translucent panes assembled into geometric forms, the hard lines of their edges converging and bisecting at various points. Light streams from unseen sources and projects rectangular shadows against an adjacent wall. Three-dimensional shapes become suddenly flat as the objects in Kasten’s still life are juxtaposed alongside their ghostly traces.

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Mapa Mundi BR (postal)

Rivane Neuenschwander

Installation (Installation)

Mapa-Mundi BR (postal) is a set of wooden shelves holding postcards that depict locations in Brazil named for foreign countries and cities. When installed, viewers are invited to fill out and mail a postcard to any destination, an act which parallels the dissemination and global circulation of image, text, and the idea of place.

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Mike and Sky

Catherine Opie

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Like many of Opie’s works, Mike and Sky presents female masculinity to defy a binary understanding of gender. The very practice of being photographed raises many complex issues around gender performance and the relationships between an inner self and an outer public persona. Even though Mike and Sky are cropped and obscure one another, many of their choices for self-presentation—as emphasized by their tattoos—remain visible.

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Untitled

Lubaina Himid

In 2007 Lubaina Himid began a series of works she later called Negative Positives: The Guardian Archive (2007-2017). What started out as a one-year project, in the year celebrating the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in the UK, continued for a decade. Taking a page or a spread of The Guardian (the most liberal newspaper in the UK and her newspaper of choice), Himid sought to expose the unconscious bias manifested in a paper that prides itself on its non-discriminatory policies.

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Mimbres pottery kill hole sequence

Mariana Castillo Deball

Installation (Installation)

Mariana Castillo Deball’s set of kill hole plates are part of a larger body of work problematizing archeological narratives, and drawing attention to the conservation process and its role in recreating an imagined object. They are playful and exaggerated representations of “kill hole pottery” — ceramic dishes in the Mimbres tradition with distinct circular holes located in the center of the pots. Although very little is known about the Mimbres culture’s specific beliefs, they are loosely understood to have terminated the object symbolically in preparation for funerary use.

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Sundown (Number Twenty)

Xaviera Simmons

Xaviera Simmons often employs her own body and collected materials in the service of her photographs and performances. Not to be mistaken as mere portraiture, however, Simmons’ works are explorations of the Black body in relation to landscape and other dimensions of non-linear space and time. Concealing and flattening her subjects with costumes and collage-like, abstract pictorial devices, the artist arranges archival photographs, printed textiles, and anthropological artifacts in configurations that highlight the power of visual culture to shape contemporary understandings of the self.

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Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California

Sharon Lockhart

Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California results from Lockhart’s prolonged investigation of an agricultural center and community. Lockhart traveled around California’s Central Valley, spending time with cattle ranchers on their properties and attending livestock auctions with them and getting a sense of the rhythm of their lives. Throughout this time, the artist shot more than one hundred four-by-five-inch negatives but chose to print just this one from the series.

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Radical Hospitality

Andrea Bowers

Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely. Meant to hang from the ceiling, Bowers’ neon is further weighed down by long wind chimes made of aluminum pipes and wooden wind catchers that drip unsteadily from their anchors. Poetic but frantic in its juxtapositions, Bowers’ work captures a certain paradoxical energy that echoes the current political climate—it is hopeful but hindered, cacophonous but well intentioned, uncertain but ominous.

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Alistair Fate

Catherine Opie

Alistair Fate (1994) depicts, presumably, a member of the LGBT community. Catherine Opie is known for her portraits of LGBT, queer, and outsider people; she intends them to come off not as shocking or different, but as human despite their deviance from societal norms. This image is one of several works by Opie in the Kadist Collection that show marginalized people, filtered through the artist’s signature appropriation of formal and classical portraiture in the interest of both documentation and reframing.

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Sobre la igualdad y las diferencias: casas gemelas

Carla Zaccagnini

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This series of photographs, Sobre la igualdad y las diferencias: casas gemelas (On Equality and Differences: Twin Houses) , taken in Havana in 2005, belongs to a wider group of works that the artist has been developing over many years, generally titled Bifurcaciones y encrucijadas (Forking Paths and Crossroads) . These works are dedicated to the collection and investigation of similarities and singularities. Some focus on things that are supposed or expected to be identical, but end up being slightly different.

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Report of the Legal Subcommittee

Carey Young

Report of the Legal Subcommittee is a print featuring a map of the stars, together with a found transcription of a recent United Nations meeting in which various international delegations declare frustration with their 40-year-old, ongoing efforts to devise a legal definition of outer space. This admission seems to hold a rich poetic potential, the human attempts to bureaucratize and control outer space seemingly frustrated by the sublime scale and mystery of its infinite depths.

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RMB City: A Second Life City Planning 04

Cao Fei

Since 2007, Cao Fei has radically focused her work on Second Life, an online space that virtually mimics “the real world” and includes everything from the expression of ideas to economic investment. Referring to China’s modernization and its capitalist and utopic visions, RMB City explores the ways in which global communication impacts imagination, values, and ways of life. By appropriating virtual reality, Cao Fei opens up a new frontier in the field of art production that surpasses conventional materiality and invites collaboration and exchanges with her public and clients.

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Memorial for intersection #2

Amalia Pica

Memorial for intersections #2 (2013) is a minimalist, black metallic structure that contains the brightly colored translucent circles, triangles, rectangles, and squares that originally were presented in Pica’s performance work A ? B ? C (2013).

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Wherein one nods with political sympathy and says I understand you better than you understand yourself, I’m just here to help you help yourself

Yee I-Lann

Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors. The artwork belongs to Yee’s series Picturing Power (2013) that deals with the destabilizing impacts of neo-colonialism and globalization on Southeast Asia’s history. Yee approaches the aesthetics and politics of the ethnographic gaze with both irony and humanity, challenging the modes of seeing inherent to the British colonization of Malaysia.

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Ben Deroy

Ben Shaffer

Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision. Often the artist works with the motifs of the counterculture and contemporary non-religious spiritualism. The figure hangs suspended—seemingly ascending—animation.

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Lynelle on my bed, NYC

Nan Goldin

Lynelle on my bed, NYC

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Stilleben mid Zierlauch (Still Life with Aluminum)

Annette Kelm

In Stilleben mid Zierlauch ( Still Life with Aluminum) Annette Kelm utilizes visual juxtaposition to bring together a gridded aluminum backdrop, a pot with a vaguely indigenous pattern on it, and two purple dandelions. The aesthetic dissonance between the mechanical, gridded aluminum and the grainy clay pot signify an interaction between systems of visual production, furthered by the aluminum grid’s inward tilt, visually apparent due to the grid pattern’s convergence at the top of the photograph. Contrasting the stark slant of the grid, the pot sits on a level surface, while the two tall stems protruding from it run at a non-parallel angle to the grid.

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Memory: Record/Erase

Nalini Malani

Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s story follows a poverty-stricken family during the German depression, as the central character, Frau Hausmann, is forced to impersonate her late husband to procure his job as a nightwatchman to support her two children. Despite her exceptional performance during the job, and even after receiving public commendation for catching a thief, when eventually her identity is discovered during a factory accident she is forced into a precarious existence where she resorts to selling herself to get by.

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Untitled

N. Dash

Dash shapes, manipulates, and molds the materials herself, as the works becomes something of a physical archive. Through these delicate and time-consuming processes, the artist’s bodily interaction with the material becomes clear, with marks of its making and traces of the artist’s hand embedded in the surface of her quiet compositions.

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Strange Culture

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government. Through interviews, scripted acting, and illustrations, Hershman Leeson outlines the series of absurd events that led to New York state’s case against the former SFAI Associate Professor and artist Steve Kurtz. By closely following Kurtz’s story, Hershman Leeson reveals a strange ripple effect of the Bush administration’s destructive policies.

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New Town Ghost

Minouk Lim

New Town Ghost (2005) is one of Lim’s trio of large-scale video installations. (The other two are S. O. S—Adoptive Dissensus [2009] and The Weight of Hands [2010].) The series grew out of her interest in capturing lost memories and the collective unconscious in rapidly globalizing cities such as Seoul.

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SpringValle_ber_girls

Petra Cortright

In the flash animation SpringValle_ber_girls , Petra Cortright collages together surreal scenes out of unnaturally idyllic desktop screensavers with equally unreal computer-generated women that pop in and out of the landscape. Cortright’s backgrounds are made seedy by the appearance of digitally-rendered strippers, while various layers of internet escapism collide together in an infinite loop. The dancing girls are sourced from VirtuaGirl, a software that makes footage of strippers available for download.

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Product Recall

Carey Young

“Product Recall” is a video perfomative pun on the action recalling memories in the form of a psychoanalytic session and the recall of faulty products from multinational corporations. Young enters a practicing psychoanalyst room and begins a session. Dressed in corporate business attire, Young encompasses both the corporation and individual.

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The Class

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook