Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The application of bright colors and kitsch materials in Flower Tree manifests a playful comment on the influence of popular culture and urban lifestyle. And though his works share a similar sensibility to Claes Oldenburg’s oversized sculptures from everyday objects, Choi draws from his immediate surroundings and life experience. Public sculptures with a flower theme are often used to decorate the rapidly urbanized cities in Asia, which are constructed with concrete and steel materials.

Photography (Photography)

Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light. The architect’s longtime studio and residence, which he built in Los Angeles in 1922, exemplifies this philosophy, and has since become an influential part of the modernist architectural canon. In Untitled (Schindler House #01) (2007), Luisa Lambri describes Schindler’s studio by capturing its aftereffects—the play of light and shadow cast through branches onto a surface.

Painting (Painting)

Chris Johanson’s Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat) (2010) pictures a canoe drifting toward an off-kilter horizon line, which demarcates the cobalt sea from the cerulean sky. An orange-haired figure, oar positioned in mid-stroke, looks ahead—whether toward an edge or an infinite expanse, it is impossible to tell. Echoing a trope that recurs in Greek epic poetry, transcendental painting, and current-day reality television, the character is alone with nature.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tarantism is the name of disease which appeared in southern Italy, resulting from the bite of a spider called Tarantula. This bite caused various symptoms, such as nausea, difficulty to speak, delusion, excitability and agitation. The victims suffered then from convulsions and the only way to heal them was to engage in a frenzied dance, as it was believed.

Photography (Photography)

Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco. The photograph is a documentation of a Golden Gate Bridge performance that makes palpable the tensions between people and the military, the individual and the group, danger and ordinary life. Lin recalls: “Fighter planes repetitively flew over my head.

Photography (Photography)

Lu has developed an oeuvre that consists of characters in bizarre situations. The large-scale photograph I Want to Be a Gentleman depicts nine men standing like statues on display in a museum on tall plinths in front of a run-down industrial building. Lu’s brooding films and photographs are preoccupied with China’s industrial era and communist history.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Destilaciones ( Distillations , 2014) is an installation composed of a group of ceramic pots, presented on the floor and within a steel structure. Copper pipes run through the perforated ceramics, evoking the design of an oil purifier. The work is a direct reference to the history of the Peruvian coastal town of Lobitos.

Photography (Photography)

#17 Pink is a photogram, a photographic image produced without the use of a camera. Here, the artist placed plumbago blossoms on a sheet of eight-by-ten-inch film and exposed it to light. The negative was then projected onto Kodak Metallic Endura paper through a color mural enlarger and cooler filters to produce the multicolored print.

Photography (Photography)

For his action, Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road , Lin built a brick wall on one side of a busy main street in the city of Guangzhou. He then took bricks from the sidewalk end of the wall and moved them to the street side, slowly extending the wall into the street. Repeating the same gesture for hours, he leapfrogged the whole wall across the street.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Photography (Photography)

Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California. Commissioned by industrialist J. Irwin Miller and his wife Xenia Simons Miller, and built by Richard Neutra in 1937, the Miller house’s open and flowing layout expands upon modernist architectural traditions. It features a flat roof, stone and glass walls, with rooms configured beneath a grid pattern of skylights and supporting cruciform steel columns.

Photography (Photography)

Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon. Designed by the architect Richard Neutra, its gray glass, white expanses, and simple forms exude austerity. Luisa Lambri’s photograph Untitled (Sten-Frenke House #04) (2007)recalls the unembellished elegance of the structure while also alluding to modernist painting; the image is less a picture than an abstract expanse that conveys its own flatness.

Photography (Photography)

Modotti’s Diego Rivera Mural: Billionaires Club; Ministry of Education, Mexico D. F., Third Gallery is a photograph of a section of a mural by Diego Rivera in the Ministry of Education in Mexico City. Rivera painted over a hundred frescoes throughout the courtyard of the building, an early mural series that helped revive and popularize the art of mural painting. Modotti, a friend of Rivera’s, took hundreds of photographs of the frescoes which depict divisions of labor in Mexican society.

Painting (Painting)

Every work in Hoeber’s 2011 series Execution Changes is titled in alphanumeric code. The geometric pattern that composes each acrylic-on-panel painting is determined by a preordained ratio of 2 to 3. But even though a formulaic system determines the image’s structure, its surface is full of painterly effects.

Installation (Installation)

Ammo Bunker (2009) is a multipart installation that includes large-scale wall prints and an architectural model. The work takes as its departure point the history of Wilmington, Ybarra’s native hometown in southern Los Angeles. The piece refers to a Civil War era ammunition store that Ybarra found at the heart of the harbor close to Long Beach.

Photography (Photography)

Unregistered City is a series of eight photographs depicting different scenes of a vacant, apparently post-apocalyptic city: Some are covered by dust and others are submerged by water. Yet, ambiguous lights blink from buildings and yachts still sail on the water, and further observation reveals these structures to be miniatures manipulated by the artist through Photoshop and other postproduction image tools. The model city’s surroundings are themselves real abandoned spaces, perhaps an empty room, a wait-to-be demolished building, or a discarded bathtub.

Photography (Photography)

Physical and mental exploration have been founding elements in Joachim Koester’s research for several years. While exploration was mainly a matter of geography during the 19th century, the 20th century brought the mental exploration of our unconscious, triggered by the discovery of psychoanalysis. Koester is interested in documenting minor events, forgotten by History, in order to reintroduce them into collective memory.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Dilemma: Three Way Fork in the Road , Wang references Peking opera in a re-interpretation of traditional text. The performance begins with two broad-knife-wielding characters circling each other in conventional operatic steps. Oblivious to the presence of these two on stage, additional characters, in a mix of period costume and contemporary dress, enter the stage in increasing droves to consume a various of foods laid out on a table until they collapse and pile on top of each other.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

From the series the Old and the New (XI) by Carlos Garaicoa belongs to the series Lo viejo y lo nuevo / Das Alte und das Neue (The Old and the New) which was first exhibited in 2010 at Barbara Gross Gallery in Germany. Here, Garaicoa’s interest in vernacular Cuban architecture shifts towards the European context: a series of twelve nineteenth-century French engravings have been reworked into delicate paper models. Here, the two-dimensional old-school architectural renderings have become the foundation for new hollow three-dimensional structures.

Photography (Photography)

Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios. These scenes are tangibly atmospheric, visually alluring and often deeply disquieting. Never anchored precisely in time or place, these and the other narratives of Beneath the Roses are rather located in the dystopic landscape of the anxious American imagination.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

HOWE

Photography (Photography)

The Italian photographer Tina Modotti is known for her documentation of the mural movement in Mexico. She had a keen eye for architectural composition, and captured eloquent details using a delicate platinum print process. In 1929 she was deported from Mexico because of her involvement in the Communist party and went to Europe.

Photography (Photography)

All his artworks utilize the use of body – the artist’s own body and that of others. The Result of 1000 Pieces typi?es an image of Lin: Lin is standing in an empty hole of a brick wall. By incorporating the brick wall for his work, Lin develops a speci?c strategy to question and negotiate with the relationship between people and the changing environments.

Painting (Painting)

Chris Johanson’s paintings, sculptures, and installations break down everyday scenes and commonplace dramas into colorful forms; the darkest sides of humanity are invoked with humor. The works comment on subjects such as capitalism, consumerism, the art world, and therapy. The triptych I Am a Human, Abstract Foil, No Humans IV (2004) is a meditation on the cosmos.

Photography (Photography)

Welling employs simple materials like crumpled aluminum foil, wrinkled fabric and pastry dough and directly exposes them as photograms, playing with the image in the process of revealing it. Although Welling’s approach to photography is more conceptually oriented than poetic, the resulting image in Stowe (a direct photogram of a crumpled piece of cloth) somehow resembles a curtain, perhaps suggesting that an artificial even fictive component in photographic representation. While the curtain might echo other imagery, Welling’s approach is not allegorical but rather abstract in a way that reinforces the materiality of the object.

Painting (Painting)

Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building. Viewers unwittingly become voyeurs, peering through the rectangles that stand for windows and observing the residents therein, who ponder questions both mundane and existential: “Where is Ron now?” and “What have I become?” The queries and characters are treated democratically—not judged, praised, or subjected to hierarchy. While their thoughts are specific, the painting captures a universal urban activity: looking across to the building next door and wondering about its residents, all the while knowing that they have probably looked over and wondered about us, as well.

Photography (Photography)

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.