Installation (Installation)

Solo (2003) is a video exhibited as a video/sound installation depicting shots of drum, voice, guitar, clavier/synthesizer, and a melodica player cut into segmented fragments from the perspective of a studio recording set. Rather than deploying a narrative strategy, Grandmaison focuses on the gestures of the musicians and the repetitions they carry out when recording their individual tracks. The musicians are portrayed nodding, dancing, improvising, strumming, creating resonance that is repeated over and over– however, Grandmaison is sure not to document their entire faces or expressions while they perform, just details.

Photography (Photography)

Gypsy shows an ambivalent scene, in which broken blinds and its unsmiling subject are balanced with the stilllife plentitude of watermelon slices and the beautifully lit nudity of the sitter. The room seems messy and in disrepair, but simultaneously romanticizes the scene. The fruit and the sitter suggest a robustness in contrast with the mise-en-scene.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace takes its title from a 1967 poem by American writer Richard Brautigan, which describes a utopian future where computers are in harmony with and protective of mankind and nature, performing all the necessary work while we retreat back towards nature. In Sisto’s work, a computer generated voice recites Brautigan’s poem while a series of digitally rendered 3D objects with a sleek, mirrored finish, float weightlessly across the screen. Sisto’s work also shares its title with the 2011 BBC documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis, which has the view that computers have failed in their task of liberating humanity and have instead created a simplified and distorted world around us.

Photography (Photography)

Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky. The women in the photograph exist ambiguously here. The photograph’s title, the subject’s outfits, and their environment suggest that they are both trapped and glorified within their position.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video No Not Nothing Never , a group of 23 domestic fans arranged in a mountainous desert landscape, move in perfect synchrony. Although when placed in this arid geography, the fans become evocative of wind turbines that generate electricity, the fans used by Pascual Sisto consume energy in a futile attempt to alleviate the dry heat. The familiar humming of the fans is eclipsed by the sounds of the strong desert winds that pass by as the fans turn.

Installation (Installation)

Nicolás Bacal uses everyday materials to evoke systems in his sculptures and installations. He often employs and alters clocks, using them as metaphors for human relationships. Light Years (2008) consists of 12 measuring tapes of different lengths, radiating out elliptically from a central mounting point on the wall.