Installation (Installation)

Corey McCorkle’s 2016 installation Pendulum is developed around the Cavendish family and their role in importing bananas to Europe. Cavendish bananas were named after William Cavendish, the 6th Duke of Devonshire. In 1834, Cavendish received a shipment of bananas from Mauritius, and developed these bananas in the greenhouses of Chatsworth House with his gardener Sir Joseph Paxton, and were later given to missionary John Williams to take to Samoa.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Butter Mountain is part of an ongoing series of works that combines a sense of painterly mass and substance with sculptural language to examine the synergy between a topographical landscape and a landscape of the human condition. The work intentionally alludes to the materiality of the human body and of the land. A stool has been consciously repurposed as a “support”, that by its nature and identity provides evidence of human presence.

Painting (Painting)

Arima’s free brushstrokes gesture towards traditions in Expressionist painting, and Ticket could be seen as an attempt at “pure painting” in which the aesthetics of the medium supersede content. But if his portraits resist social commentary, they nonetheless challenge conventional standards of beauty through a decided embrace of decayed forms and colors. Inspired by underground creative cultures, his paintings have the slipshod spontaneity of graffiti and other types of street art.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“BC/AD” (Before Cancer, After Diagnoses) is a video of photographs of the artist’s face dating from early childhood to the month before he died, accompanied by the last diary entries he wrote from April 2004 to July 2005 (entitled “50 Reasons for Getting Out of Bed”), from the period from when he lost his voice, thinking he had laryngitis, through the moment he was diagnosed with lung cancer and the subsequent treatment that was ultimately, ineffective. The diary entries are at once poignant, ironic, laced with gallows of humor, with his continued eye for the little incidents in life, interweaving the past with his experience of the present. The morphing of the portraits—the eyes and sight remaining leveled—is haunting, beginning with very blurry images of childhood and ending with a pin-sharp photograph of Breakwell the month before he died.