Sculpture (Sculpture)

Glorie #7 by Caspar Heinemann is made from cardboard boxes in which the artist received deliveries at home during lockdown, as well as other materials that he uses in an improvisatory way. Initially, Heinemann began this project by wanting to make a series of birdhouses, an interest of his that derived from walking in parks during lockdown, when bird life was so much more present as a result of the reduction in traffic noise and the absence of aircrafts. Though birdhouses may be safe spaces to nurture fledglings, they are also inherently absurd, as human constructs projected onto bird life.

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

Sculpture (Sculpture)

For Untitled, Caesar encased recycled objects such as scraps of plywood, paper or cloth in resin and then cut and reassembled the pieces into abstract forms. This technical rework allows for a clinical inspection of the material contents of the piece and the resulting slanted industrial monolith echoes minimalist sculpture, although with a different expressive texture. Indeed, Untitled can be seen as a contemporary pyramid with a painterly surface.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

After being cast, the resulting resin block used in JCA-25-SC was cut into thin slices obtaining a series of rectangular shapes that resemble ceramic tiles. Usually displayed in grid against the wall or in a corner, the viewer is able to follow the sequence of cross sections to visually recreate the work’s genesis. In this way, Caesar’s pieces embody an interesting x-ray or archaeology of the artistic process itself.

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)

Addressing the legacy of colonialism, The Guestbook by Musquiqui Chihying and Gregor Kasper is a slow-paced, black-and-white film exploring the German colony of Togoland, now the Republic of Togo. The guestbook in question—a thin, battered copy that Do Do, the Togolese protagonist of the film, finds in Berlin’s State Library—is filled with the signatures of colonial-era explorers. The plot follows Do Do as he seeks out Treptower Park, where the JAZZ musician Kwassi Bruce was once exhibited in a human zoo in the first German Colonial Exhibition.