Arpedia

Happy Birthday

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Jonathan Monk

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Untitled (Rolled up)

Jonathan Monk

Untitled (rolled up) , is an abstract portrait of Owen Monk, the artist’s father and features an aluminum ring of 56.6 cm in diameter measuring 1.77 cm in circumference, the size of his father. Jonathan Monk bridges a conceptual art and his family privacy, and ironically ensures that there is “no difference between Sol Lewitt and my mother, he does not know more than she do not know. ” What is the status of the O-backed chair rail to the white cube?

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8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America

Kara Walker

In her masterpiece 8 Possible Beginnings or The Creation of African-America , Walker unravels just that, the story of struggle, oppression, escape and the complexities of power dynamics in the history following slave trade in America. Her use of contour and silhouette accentuate emotion with rigor, she reduces the narrative to black and white as gruesome acts of sex and violence address trauma, fear and suffering through a majestic play of shadow and light.

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Charco portatil congelado (Frozen Portable Puddle)

Gabriel Orozco

Charco portátil congelado (Frozen Portable Puddle, 1994) is a photographic record of an installation of the same name that Gabriel Orozco made at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam for the group exhibition WATT (1994). The artist arrived a week prior to the opening with no artwork to install, and created three spontaneous works from locally sourced materials. This one was made of white plastic record sleeves that Orozco arranged on the damp roof of the gallery.

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Mickey Mouse

Paul McCarthy

To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey. On his shoulders he supports an enormous false head, Mickey’s familiar face grinning with glossy eyes. The artist has marked out in heavy black the background of Cinderella’s castle.

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La Loge Harlem

Abigail DeVille

The work La Loge Harlem focuses on the history of Harlem and its development over the last 200 years. It was a playground for the rich in the 19th century and where Old New York had its summer homes and diversions. The center image is a portrait of the artist’s grandmother when she was 16 in 1949.

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Untitled (San Francisco)

Edward Kienholz

Installation (Installation)

Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name. Assembled from the remnants and found objects from a hotel room, including a collage, shelf and small lamp, this playful piece—a satirical shrine of sorts—echoes the decidedly un-modern spirit of San Francisco’s bohemian culture. Kienholz’s works, with their critical and anti-establishment content, are often linked to the 1960s Funk Art movement in the Bay Area.

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Perro en Tlalpan (Dog in Tlalpan)

Gabriel Orozco

Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape. He travels armed with his camera and insightfully captures scenes of the everyday that other people might ignore. Perro en Tlalpan (Dog in Tlalpan, 1992) is a photograph of a dog regally perched under an industrial shelter in the borough of Tlalpan in Mexico City.

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Black Hands, White Cotton

Hank Willis Thomas

Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title. As with many of his works, the artist has taken a found image and manipulated it to draw out and dramatize the formal contrast between the black hands holding white cotton. Cotton, of course is one of the most familiar fabric sources to us, and becomes incredibly soft once processed.

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South Africa Righteous Space

Hank Willis Thomas

Installation (Installation)

South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race.

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A Place to Call Home

Hank Willis Thomas

A Place to Call Home

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Columpio

Gabriel Orozco

Columpio

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Cemetery #1

Gabriel Orozco

Gabriel Orozco comments: “In the exhibition [Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002], I tried to connect with the photographs I took in Mali in July. I traveled to Mali for three weeks and took some photographs related to my work. They are very different, but there are links as the graveyard of Timbuktu, which I discovered during the trip.

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I Am A Man

Hank Willis Thomas

Painting (Painting)

The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism. Historically, in countries such as the US and South Africa, the term “boy” was used as a pejorative and racist insult towards men of color, slaves in particular, signifying their alleged subservient status as being less than men. In response, Am I Not A Man And A Brother?

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Olive Oil (from the Propo Series)

Paul McCarthy

Olive Oil (from the Propo Series)

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Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants

Paul McCarthy

Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself. In homage to an influence in his early career, McCarthy attempted to reconstruct a pair of pants worn by Black Panther revolutionary Eldridge Cleaver in a picture that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s. But in the process, McCarthy misremembered their original design of the pants, which had black outer panels and white inner panels in white, and left a black shape highlighted in the crotch area.

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Mother Pig, Shushi Gallery, San Diego Performance

Paul McCarthy

McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works. Here, McCarthy squirts liquid out of a bottle held near his crotch onto a stuffed animal in the shape of a lion. The costuming, materials, and simulated bodily functions frequently appear in McCarthy’s work, which often disturbingly juxtaposes visceral and startling manipulation of the body with the cheerful artifacts of popular consumer culture.

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Bread and Roses

Hank Willis Thomas

Painting (Painting)

Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911. “Bread for all, and Roses, too’—a slogan of the women in the West,” is Oppenheim’s opening line, alluding to the workers’ goal for wages and conditions that would allow them to do more than simply survive. Thomas’ painting includes several black, white, brown, yellow, and red raised fists—clenched and high in the air in the internationally recognized symbol of solidarity, resistance, and unity.

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Intentionally Left Blanc

Hank Willis Thomas

Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting. Using a found photograph depicting a passionate crowd of African Americans—their attitude suggesting the fervor of a civil-rights era audience— Intentionally Left Blanc reverts in its exposed, “positive” format to an image in which select faces are whitened out and erased, the exact inverse of the same view in its “negative” condition. This dialectic of light and dark re-emerges when we view the same faces again, only this time black and featureless, a scattering of disembodied heads amidst a sea of white.

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Black Imitates White

Hank Willis Thomas

Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content. Meaning, therefore, changes depending on one’s perspective—and in the case of Thomas’ installation, only emerges when one knows that there is always something hidden, always more to one of his works than immediately meets the eye. This lenticular print with text shifts as you walk in front of it from its title, “Black Imitates White” to the inverse, “White Imitates Black”(and some other possibilities in between) emphasizing that there are always at least two perspectives to the same scenario, and thereby encouraging us as viewers to consider them all together rather than trying to identify with any one subjectivity.

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I am the Greatest

Hank Willis Thomas

Painting (Painting)

Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s. I am the Greatest presents the famous quote by Mohammad Ali to think about his important presence in the African American community. In dialogue with the painting I am a Man, also in the Kadist collection, this assertion that begins the same way takes the line from the protest poster several steps further.

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Monteverdi Ici – Deeply, Feeling Filling the World

Laure Prouvost

Textile (Textile)

Monteverdi Ici – Deeply, Feeling Filling the World by Laure Prouvost is a tapestry that references a video by the artist entitled Monteverdi Ici (2018). Both artworks feature a woman’s naked body as a central visual element. In the video, the woman’s body is outdoors, with her back to the camera, moving her arms gently through the surrounding flowers.

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Stong Sory Vegetables

Laure Prouvost

In Stong Sory Vegetables , Laure Prouvost explains that she woke up one morning and that some vegetables had fallen from the sky on her bed, making a hole in her ceiling. Each video, in this series, is an odd still life representation turning everyday elements into imaginary and funny stories. A tomato, an onion, a lemon and a carrot are displayed in front of the monitor as relics.

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The Parle Ment Metal Woman Welcoming You

Laure Prouvost

The Parle Ment Metal Woman Welcoming You is a character originated from a series of works combining sculpture and video with a specific role— lying on the floor playing a romantic elevator tune, this Metal Woman welcomes and flirts with viewers in the space where she is posed. The characters from this series take the form of wrecked silhouettes made of sticks baring pink muscles and breasts with disproportionate LCD TV screen heads. The screen heads broadcast an endless flow of texts and images, speaking for and animating these bodies.

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Sal Sem Carne

Cildo Meireles

Meireles, whose work often involves sound, refers to Sal Sem Carne (Salt Without Meat) as a “sound sculpture.” The printed images and sounds recorded on this vinyl record and it’s lithographed sleeve describe the massacre of the Krahó people of Brazil. The piece draws on Meireles’s first-hand contact with many indigenous groups through his father’s work with the Indian Protection Service. The recordings on the LP contain narrative accounts of massacres of native peoples, as well as indigenous music and rituals.

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Monteverdi Ici

Laure Prouvost

Monteverdi Ici by Laure Prouvost is a non-narrative video work that depicts the back of the artist’s naked body standing, with her back towards the camera in a field. Her bare arms gesture outwards and forwards, as if her movements are influencing the wild flowers billowing in the foreground. Alternating between the artist’s body and imagery of leaves, flowers, cats, and caterpillars, Prouvost speaks directly to the viewer, stating: “The world behind that field would be here, the world would enter through here”.

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Pair of shoes / Shoes with eggs

Hans-Peter Feldmann

Installation (Installation)

The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations. Verging on a form of fetichism, his shoe collections are a case in point and indeed, for some exhibitions, he even asked gallery employees for their shoes. Against authorship and the commodification of art, he never gives titles or dates to his works which have infinite edition possibilities.

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Untitled

Mark Bradford