Arpedia

El neon de los narquitectos

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Tribute to Inside Looking Out - For the male artists along my way

Wong Wai Yin

In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China. For this video, Wong accompanied six male friends from art school to a group show of their work titled “Inside Looking Out” at Osage Gallery in Beijing. Throughout her visit, she was rarely acknowledged for her own creative accomplishments and was more frequently introduced as an artist’s girlfriend, and often without name.

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I can’t believe we are still protesting

Wong Wai Yin

Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages. The artist used found images from the internet, including a viral photo of an elderly woman who took part in the 2016 “Black Monday” strike against a proposed anti-abortion law in Poland, and another image taken the same year of a group of protestors in the United Kingdom, rallying for the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing parallels with Hank Willis Thomas’s I Am a Man (2013) painting in the KADIST Collection, Wong employs the visual language and terminology of mass media, specifically borrowing images from protests on civil rights issues.

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Vallegrande 1967

Claudia Joskowicz

The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television. Video plays a role in the relation between the use of her locations and the stories of actual figures depicted as central in the frame. The meaning behind these historical icons such as Che and Cassidy, speak to their stories as itinerant figures whom traveled in a preglobalized era through borders and cultures in order to escape the law or overthrow it.

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material. For this project, Oppenheim procured the original glass negatives, which had been damaged over time, from the archives of this newspaper. She then printed the negatives as is, highlighting the multitude of physical flaws that had ‘spoiled’ the negatives.

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ONE MILLION (Japanese Yen)

Kwan Sheung Chi

Kwan Sheung Chi’s work One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills. Divided into three versions, the video first shows a number of Japanese ten-thousand-yen bills being counted without in an orderly, efficient manner. In Two Million , a similar counting of one-thousand-dollar bills from Hong Kong follows.

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Ante la imagen

Oscar Munoz

In Ante la imagen (Before the Image, 2009) Muñoz continues to explore the power of a photograph to live up to the memory of a specific person. Since a photograph is fixed, it cannot encapsulate the spirit of someone who is gone. Muñoz etched onto the surface of a mirror an appropriated historical image, a daguerreotype from 1839.

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A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s clothes drying rack

Kwan Sheung Chi

A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s cloths drying rack (2007) was realized in the year of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. The artist asked his parents to perform a flags-raising-lowering ceremony on their home’s cloths drying rack, with the HKSAR regional flag, and the flags of PRC and The UK. Artist Lee Kit hand-painted the HKSAR regional flag following the detail instructions in “The State’s Standards of The People’s Republic of China, GB16689-1996”, issued by The State Authority of Technical Monitoring.

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Undocumented Intervention

Julio Cesar Morales

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.

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Lift with care

Hu Yun

Installation (Installation)

This research-based artwork acts as a memorial to early twentieth century European exploration of China. An antique open suitcase reveals a pile of rubbings and an air-dried peony, while projected photographs of the Chinese landscape appear as a slideshow on the gallery wall. The artifacts refer to a 1908-1909 expedition of naturalists, missionaries, and colonists to the west of China, which ended abruptly with the death of one of the travelers by unusual circumstances.

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Until It Makes Sense

Mario Garcia Torres

Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art. For him, this is a way of rethinking the tradition in a more personal way, to have a grip on events of recent history and examine them with a curiosity, both critical and sensual. The artist emphasizes the fact that new ideas and meanings may arise from these archaeological narratives.

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Island

Kan Xuan

In Kan Xuan’s four-channel video Island , a series of objects like nail clippers, hairbrush, toothpaste, and house decorations are shot in close-ups. These highly polished and aestheticized images create a poetic visual flow. However, in front of each object lies a coin of different value—two yuan, one pound, one euro, one dollar—that silently reveals the material value of the household supplies.

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Hommage To Balotelli's Missed Trick

Burak Delier

Burak Delier’s sculpture Homage to Balotelli’s Missed Trick is a symbol of resistance to the demand for success and performance. The sculpture represents Italian soccer player Mario Balotelli, who intentionally missed an opportunity to score during a 2011 game between LA Galaxy and Manchester City. The miniature Balotelli stands on his left foot, raising his right foot to kick the ball.

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Useless Wonder

Carlos Amorales

This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006). The video is based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket . The painting, derived from an image from a different, preexisting work, represents the artist’s continued interest in realizing particular subject matter in alternative forms, thereby imbuing it with new meanings and interpretations.

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Excerpt (Sealed) (Brown)

Stephen G. Rhodes

For his series of digital collages Excerpt (Sealed)… Rhodes appropriated multiple images from mass media and then sprayed an X on top of their glass and frame. This visual seal refers to the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in which rescue workers spray painted the doors of the houses they searched giving the date, the team and the number of bodies found. Excerpt (Sealed) (Brown) is a multilayered collage with contradictory imagery—from New Orleans debris to the American eagle and a theater curtain.

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The Transparencies of the Non-Act

Mario Garcia Torres

Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969. This article, which is the only trace of his work, is indicative of a lack of interest by Neuestern to leave his name in history; to “defend an artistic activity that has little or no interest to last.” Oscar Neuestern could only remember the previous 24 hours, of which his life and his work are in constant erasure and reconstruction. His practice was “to let things be done with time and the unconscious,” while “not fearing the void.” He looked for the absolute through transparency and symmetry.

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Los rastreadores

Claudia Joskowicz

Los rastreadores is a two-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz narrating the story of a fictitious drug lord, Ernesto Suarez, whose character is based on the well-known Bolivian drug dealer, Roberto Suárez. In the video, Suarez returns home from prison and survives a massacre that takes place at his home in Bolivia. Told in four chapters, the story is inspired by John Ford’s American Western classic film The Searchers (1956), this work similarly focuses on the politicized atmosphere of Bolivian history, searching for cues of race and alienation.

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There are veins in these lands, I

Rodney McMillian

Painting (Painting)

In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point. Calling up the unknown intimacies of these objects, McMillian upends their usual orientation, placing them directly on the wall to serve as paintings, rather than covers. Layering over the repurposed textiles with hardware store paint, McMillian transforms the sheets into canvases, creating abstract landscapes on top of the traces of human bodies intact in the fabric.

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From Useless Wonder 04

Carlos Amorales

This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006). The video is based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The painting, derived from an image from a different, preexisting work, represents the artist’s continued interest in realizing particular subject matter in alternative forms, thereby imbuing it with new meanings and interpretations.

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Open Mind

Yoan Capote

Open Mind is a model created by Capote for a traversable public maze that, when seen from above, resembles the human brain. Because individual movement through the maze echoes the movement of neurons and a larger aggregated whole, visitors can be seen to enact a model of sociality and public space that both embodies and metaphorizes social consciousness. Capote’s model shows not just the proposed structure, but features figurines as well, to illustrate the possible scale and interactivity of the final piece.

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Sundown (Number Twenty)

Xaviera Simmons

Xaviera Simmons often employs her own body and collected materials in the service of her photographs and performances. Not to be mistaken as mere portraiture, however, Simmons’ works are explorations of the Black body in relation to landscape and other dimensions of non-linear space and time. Concealing and flattening her subjects with costumes and collage-like, abstract pictorial devices, the artist arranges archival photographs, printed textiles, and anthropological artifacts in configurations that highlight the power of visual culture to shape contemporary understandings of the self.

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Lynelle on my bed, NYC

Nan Goldin

Lynelle on my bed, NYC

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Destilaciones

Ximena Garrido Lecca

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.

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Shasta

Diego Rivera

In 1940 Rivera came to San Francisco for what would be his last mural project in the city, Pan-American Unity . Currently housed at City College of San Francisco as a permanent installation, for a time it was in storage and not on public display. During the same period, he created the charcoal sketchentitled Shasta (1940), of large construction machinery that the artist saw near the Mount Shasta dam.

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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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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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Black Imitates White

Hank Willis Thomas