Arpedia

The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon. The images allude to recurring topics, such as the superhero (present both in Untitled Superman and No title without the comics ), a book cover (his literary sources), or a mushroom cloud. Inspired by the writings of William Faulkner, Daniel Defoe, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, Pettibon’s sophisticated, witty drawings combine image and text to explore the gamut of American popular culture.

Untitled (Wall Street’s Chosen Few…) is typical of Pettibon’s drawings in which fragments of text and image are united, but yet gaps remain in their signification. A full story seems present but is not fully within the viewer’s grasp. Here, Pettibon draws a connection between legal restrictions on free speech and the power of an elite on Wall Street.

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Mushroom Cloud

Raymond Pettibon

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Untitled

Wallace Berman

Untitled

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Untitled (Shuffle)

Wallace Berman

While Untitled (Shuffle) presents the same formal characteristics as the rest of Berman’s verifax collages, this constellation of specific images inside the radio’s frames—the Star of David, Hebrew characters, biblical animals—have Jewish symbolism and attest to the artist’s lasting obsession with the kabala. The piece’s sub-title, “Shuffle,” suggests the presence of chance and randomness in any given organization of elements.

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Untitled (Construction)

Larry Bell

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Untitled (Construction) recalls the series of glass cubes that gained Bell international recognition in the 1960s. Resembling a black-mirrored box, this recent iridescent piece produces an uncanny effect in which the interior planes seem to enclose a mysterious light. Although austere in form, Bell’s works are far from simple: he uses technology like a vacuum-coating process, to accurately control the different levels of opacity and transparency on the surface of his immaculate glass works.

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Collapse

Will Rogan

Shot in the streets of Tokyo, Collapse , is a meditation on the passing of time and on the complicated way in which we are smashed between the past and the future. The video follows a moped carrying a woman holding a very large mirror. The mirror is large enough that she can’t see what lies ahead, she can only see what has already come as reflections in the mirror.

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VFGY9

Larry Bell

Like many of Larry Bell’s works, VFGY9 deals primarily with the viewer’s experience of sight. The blocks resemble a stone carving, or slabs of wood shaped into a simple organic composition whose overall sheen is varied through a thin layer of aluminum vapor. Yet, the real material of Bell’s piece is actually light, formed within the viewer’s eye into masses as present as stone.

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Untitled (The way in is the way out)

Alicia McCarthy

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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Reborn

Desiree Holman

Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct. The video features a group of women as they tenderly cradle lifelike baby dolls atop their rocking chairs. Although at first, the video might appear as a celebration of the maternal bond, the scene soon becomes eerie and unsettling as we see milk spilling out of the mothers’ mouths.

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Silencer #16 & #17

Will Rogan

MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication. In the series, Rogan alters the magazine’s pages by erasing the image of the magicians doing their tricks, leaving only the background of their performances on view. These contexts range from the more overtly staged scenario in Silencer #16 —the erased magician is about to perform a trick on his assistant trapped on an odd, almost dada looking box—to the more “colloquial” Silencer #17 in which the absent magician’s silhouette appears in what seems to be a children’s hospital.

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Eraser

Will Rogan

Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees. The steely grey sky stands in stark contrast to the vehicle’s luminously pristine white finish and makes this already deathly object seem even more ghostly. The grass underneath is half-turned brown and further marks this as a lifeless landscape.

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Untitled (Colors) and Untitled (Ghost)

Alicia McCarthy

A painting reminiscent of a certain “naive primitivism,” Untitled (Colors) and Untitled (Ghost) are 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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Sound of Ice Melting

Paul Kos

Installation (Installation)

Sound of Ice Melting is based on the ancient Zen Buddhist koan about the sound of one hand clapping. Here, Kos has surrounded two twenty-five-pound blocks of ice with eight microphones that call to mind the political press conferences prevalent during the Vietnam War era when this piece was created. Zen practice values such absurdity as a way to transcend the limitations of ordinary discourse and rational thought—empirical processes at the root of all political conflicts.

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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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A poem written by 5 poets at once (first attempt)

Koki Tanaka

This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013. These videos show several participants from different backgrounds gathering to create and object or an action. For this video, he brought together five Japanese poets from different movements and styles.

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Untitled #1 #2 #3

Piero Golia

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall. More than a simple reference to the sport, the work has the disconcerting effect of creating a danger zone in the gallery space. The reference to direct aggression or violence is reinforced by the piece’s rapid pace.

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Splinters and Seconal

Ed Ruscha

In 1970, Ruscha began a series of paintings made from stains. He experimented with a variety of materials (gun powder, dust, blood, among many others) to leave surface traces of different objects. The resulting images are negative shapes amidst blurry environments like Splinters and Seconal in which a grey surface is imprinted with the materials mentioned in the title.

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Captain X

Luke Butler

In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment. However, Kirk’s passive pose doesn’t so much suggest the aftermath of a battle as it does heavy contemplation, depression, or utter despair. Captain X is part of a series of paintings depicting various Star Trek characters who are stricken with human emotion-—a tactic that diminishes the mythological grandeur associated with this heroic captain and his indefatigable crew.

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Untitled (Bird and Eyes)

Clare Rojas

Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters. While Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) does not depict any actual women, it nevertheless alludes to gender roles and the power of the female gaze. Apparently playful, this scene of two animals has an ominous quality: A bird and a hedgehog confront at each other and the bird appears to be poking, even eating the hedgehog’s eye.

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Raven (gun)

Catherine Opie

In this work, a woman sits on a couch with her shirt pulled up to expose her pierced nipples, which are connected by a chain. She wears an expression of both pleasure and intensity as she points a gun at someone or something outside of the frame. Raven (gun) (1994) is not so much threatening as full of sexuality and potential energy.

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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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California Stories Attempt to correlate social class with elevation above main harbor channel (San Pedro, July 1975)

Allan Sekula

San Pedro is a seaside city, part of the Los Angeles Harbor, sitting on the edge of a channel. California Stories: Attempt to correlate social class with elevation above main harbor channel (San Pedro, July 1975) (1973–2011) is a series of coupled gelatin silver prints that show the artist using his hand to measure the elevation of various pieces of real estate, ranging from a manicured mansion to a ramshackle beach house. A direct equation becomes evident between the social strata these homes represent and the height at which the artist holds his hand.

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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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Radical Hospitality

Andrea Bowers

Sculpture (Sculpture)

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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Arms & Legs (Specif. Elbows & Knees), etc.: Arm (with Bottle)

John Baldessari