This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him. He captures incongruities or everyday simplicity and highlights their suggestive power. The composition and framing of these interventions specially emphasizes the object of interest and the humor of the context.
In 1978, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville made the TV series: “France / tour / detour / two / children”, in which they aimed to identify the lifestyle of French people in 12 episodes of 26 minutes each. On each episode a little boy and girl are firstly asked about their daily lives. By broadening the scope of the interview, the questions of Godard and Mieville gradually bring the protagonists to think of themselves as subjects in the history of the world, to “live and see themselves on television” with a critical point of view.
This ephemeral installation by Jirí Kovanda, documented in the same way as his performances with a photograph and a text, belongs to a body of works that took place in his apartment/studio. During an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artist highlighted that he had never had a studio and that this work space blended with his apartment. A piece of string cuts across the room in a diagonal; it functions as a scale to measure time and space.
Fairy #2 (2011) depicts a surreal scene of roughly assembled household ephemera, potted plants, and a faintly visible figure rendered in thin red line. The picture shows a grouping of tables and stools arranged in a dense cluster. A collection of objects, all brown or burlap-hued, cover their surfaces: ceramic pots, wooden planks, roughly geometric wooden sculptures, and even a small figure that perches precariously atop of miniature cube alongside a forked wood finish form.
Washington D. C. Constitution Ave. is a silver gelatin print from the series American Surveillance , a ten-year-long project where Richard Gordon photographed surveillance cameras across USA. In the image, a woman and a child walk along Constitutional Avenue as a surveillance camera on the street post directs its gaze towards them. The otherwise quiet image then becomes an exercise of resistance: together with the other images from the series, Gordon’s photograph documents the changes that have taken place in architecture, civic life, especially in a post 9/11 experience of public space.
In Amantes (Lovers) Juan Carlos points his lens at his own environment, his underground (literally) studio in Havana. A beautiful and intimate image of a seedy yet casual scene of two lovers in the background foreshadowed by a beautiful young woman smoking a joint in the foreground, a very powerful and not too subtle political representation of the current realities and truth of youth life in Havana. Juan Carlos Alom is an artist known for his documentary photography of Cuba’s subcultures and underground scenes.
Contrast to the bustling and unrelenting experience of a city such as Hong Kong, Chris Huen Sin Kan paints the tranquil interiors of his apartment, where he leads a modest and almost hermit-like life. He does not try to capture a particular moment, but rather the simultaneously changes that occur before him in time, exploring the nuances of light and reflections and recording movements in his apartment, his dog’s behavior and reactions, the way his plant change over time, all in an attempt to find a visual expression of his cognitive experience. Doodood and John are the names of his dog and the plant.
Hands Around in Yangon is both a secular and religious exploration of the meaning of hands in Myanmar. Moe Satt’s father is Muslim, while his mother is Buddhist. In the Buddhist context, hand gestures or mudras are often important in signifying the identity of deities.
Tropical Vulture is a cross-generational project which highlights the artistic influences between George Kuchar, a Bay Area legend of independent filmmaking, and Mexican artist Miguel Calderón. Conversations with a Tropical Vulture is an experimental narrative video, co-directed by both artists, and blends Hollywood glamour and drama with an all-too-real life approach, which creates and inspires a counterpoint of unattainable desire against unbearable actuality. The video, shot on location in Acapulco, utilizes a “lo-fi” aesthetic and playful use of non-professional actors.
New Landmark No. 1 is part of the series New Landmark . In this series, Tsang reversed the direction of his camera lens, and capture images of skyscrapers from an upshot angle.
Moké’s Sans Titre (1994) depicts the everyday life of the suburbs from a distant and elevated perspective. Looking down on a residential area we see groups of children playing in the street, we see cars and trucks loaded with produce backed up on the road that runs through the center of the tableau. We see two Skol adverting billboards that line the road; Skol being the fifth biggest beer brand by volume in the world that was established in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1965.
The two works in the Kadist collection, Observador Pasivo and 3600 besos por hora by Diaz are culled from a vast compilation of videos and performances for the camera. These are very successful in transcending the local into the global and/or universal. Memory, surveillance, and the routine and/or familiar, life in terms of both the political life and the social collective life shared by the constant reminder of the shut-off island psychological landscape.
“Untitled” was filmed in Bodh Gaya, India during a residency in 2011. There, he came across a scene that appealed to his interest in the political and social aspects of modernity. He filmed a policeman who, seemingly, is controlling traffic.
Yosuke Takeda gives the viewer brightly colored views, each of which he has searched out and patiently waited for. He gives light a density in the precise moments he captures—a forest’s leaves shimmering in the early morning, a street’s reflective surface radiating color at night, luminous blinds drawn over an apartment window. He achieves his distinctive effects by using an old, second hand analog era lens that he attaches to his digital camera.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Ballad of the Unabomber Part I is a painting by Orion Shepherd that features several manila folders stacked in order according to their size, resting atop a grainy hardwood pattern. The painting refers to Theodore John Kaczynski, most commonly known as the Unabomber, and depicts the seemingly innocuous manila envelopes, which through his hands became fatal explosive weapons. Despite the deplorable actions that earned Kaczynski a life sentence, the manifesto that he demanded to be published has been regarded by many as a sane and highly intelligent work, correct in several of his ideas.
Each day, Yuji Agematsu smokes a pack of cigarettes and wanders the streets of New York City looking for trash. Needless to say, he finds it everywhere: bottle caps, gummed hair, translucent miscellany, sick feathers, hot pink plastics, unknown, and more. The varied bits are then constellated by the artist in cellophane cigarette wrappers—modest vitrines for his steady collecting habit.
Eileen Quinlan’s abstracted images, like Swipe , rely on the manipulation of photographic materials inside the studio itself, and reject the exterior world for complex interrogations of the medium.
Mateo Lopez uses paper as a medium to conjure personal experiences. The artist creates drawings and trompe l’oeil objects, ranging from apples to clothing hangers to doors. These props are part of a performance; he often sets up his studio in public and uses cues from his own journeys as the inspiration for his work.
Dorsky’s pieces included in the Kadist Collection are small still photographs from twelve of his most important films. Here, the still images function in the same way as his cinematographic work: Highly aesthetic, they allow for the appearance of intricate visual patterns and layers of meaning that take scenes of everyday life as its source material. Both Dorsky’s cinematic and photographic works follow a stream of consciousness that rejects representation or fixed narrative structure.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
All Kovanda’s artistic practice poses the question of visibility. Having worked on actions and performance, the artist decided to ‘disappear’ from his artworks during twenty years; in 2007, his performance Kissing through glass in the institutional setting of Tate Modern was acclaimed by critics. Some works are only visible thirty years later via traces and archives; the artist’s rehabilitation by institutions and galleries offers a new critical reading of his practice which had until then remained rather confidential.
The photograph Monologic – Yo-Yo 1, 2 (U. F. O. ), (1982), shows Koller playing with a big white Yo-Yo in a drab concrete building among a group of tower blocks.
NO POSITIONS AVAILABLE is composed of panels covering the entire wall of the gallery exemplifying one of the tendencies of the artist. The “billboard sign,” like a ready-made, plays with the different meanings of the title, literally and abstractly. The repetition of the sign, as it has used in Minimal and Conceptual art, fills the space.
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.
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012). In photographing seemingly mundane images of doorways and walls, Wiley collapses the viewer’s experience of inhabiting space by foregrounding features that we all too often miss in our built environment: the peeling white paint on a Corinthian column or the rusty studs on a blue door.
Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos. When it comes her turn to “perform,” Bornstein displays mundane and disposable—but elaborately archived or framed—consumer objects such as coffee lids, plastic straws, candy wrappers, and product labels. Through the medium of public broadcasting, then, she makes visual the frequently overlooked but massive cultural penetration of advertising, and its proliferation of “throwaway culture” via images.
The Illusion of Everything (2014) follows an unseen pedestrian as he navigates the Australian city of Melbourne’s dense and intricate network of laneways. The video begins with the pedestrian traversing a seemingly idyllic ivy lined stone and concrete thoroughfare. As his pace begins to accelerate, the camera follows him with greater urgency, slowly settling and become stable again as his pace decelerates.
Yosuke Takeda started from experimenting with darkroom photography production and he shifted over to digital photography, aware that photographic film and paper were becoming obsolete...
Originally from Chicago, Richard Gordon was a self-taught photographer best known for his intelligent and masterfully printed black-and-white photographs...
The photographic artwork of Santu Mofokeng (b...
James Weeks, born in 1922, was an important figure in the Bay Area figurative painter tradition, with contemporaries such as Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and David Park...
Orion Shepherd is a Los Angeles based artist working across drawing, collage, painting and sculpture...
Luke Murphy is a systems-based artist whose work is loosely bound by common themes of quantifying elements of the psyche and spirit with a particular interest in the Gnostic gospels, religious paintings, and digital languages – codes and systems to make art...
Mohammed Kazem (b...
Nathaniel Dorsky belongs to a younger generation of filmmakers that follows key figures of the Bay Area avant-garde scene, like Bruce Conner, and is mainly associated with Canyon Cinema...
Eileen Quinlan makes photographic images through unusual processes, stripping the medium down to its essentials, and working experimentally with light, lenses, chemicals, reflections, and shadows...
Kate Mitchell’s work addresses everyday worries; time, money, work and the future...
Growing up in Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Pozarek experienced political aggression, spying and ludicrous impediments...
Working with various mediums, from sculpture to installation, site-specific interventions, and readymades, Leonardo Engel addresses issues related to the climate, nature, traditional crafts, architecture, and popular culture of the Caribbean...
Gao Mingyan produces video based-works that examine the political and epistemological violence of our contemporary moment...
Working in paint, performance, and small, diorama-like wall sculptures, Seattle transplant Nicholas Buffon responds to his context through intimate gestures, examinations, and recreations...
Context is everything when it comes to the work of Humberto Diaz...
Working primarily with photography, but more recently with video and lightboxes, Eason Tsang Ka takes inspiration from the urban density of Hong Kong as well as from everyday objects....
“While taking the picture it was challenging to make the boys sit properly without moving...
“People often asked if they could pose with the Kodak advertisement where a full scale woman is featured with a camera offering Kodak rolls...
“People often asked if they could pose with the Kodak advertisement where a full scale woman is featured with a camera offering Kodak rolls...
“The two men were relatives and both were in the Lebanese Army.” Hashem El Madani...
Drawing & Print
All Kovanda’s artistic practice poses the question of visibility...
This ephemeral installation by Jirí Kovanda, documented in the same way as his performances with a photograph and a text, belongs to a body of works that took place in his apartment/studio...
Kovanda’s street interventions are always documented according to the same format as the actions: a piece of A4 paper, a typewritten text giving a precise location and date, and a photograph...
Kovanda’s street interventions are always documented according to the same format as the actions: a piece of A4 paper, a typewritten text giving a precise location and date, and a photograph...
Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape...
Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos...
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)...
His series, The Golden State, harkens back to his early career and his photographic training...
San Francisco, Moscone Center is a silver gelatin print from the series American Surveillance , a ten-year-long project where Richard Gordon photographed surveillance cameras across USA...
It rains, Paris, 1st July 2000 , which could be the refrain of a song, is the title of a photograph of a minimal moment, the vision of a Parisian pedestrian, a cut flower lying on the pavement covered in rain drops...
This series of photographs, Sobre la igualdad y las diferencias: casas gemelas (On Equality and Differences: Twin Houses) , taken in Havana in 2005, belongs to a wider group of works that the artist has been developing over many years, generally titled Bifurcaciones y encrucijadas (Forking Paths and Crossroads) ...
His Deck Painting I recalls the simplistic stripes of conceptual artist Daniel Buren, or the minimal lines of twentieth century abstract painting, but is in reality a readymade, fashioned from repurposed fabric of deck chairs...
This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him...
This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him...
NO POSITIONS AVAILABLE is composed of panels covering the entire wall of the gallery exemplifying one of the tendencies of the artist...
In City Golf (2008) the artist Gao Mingyan films himself playing 18 “holes” of golf throughout the mega-city of Shanghai...
In line with Hernández’s interest in catastrophe, Vulnerabilia (choques) is a collection of images of shipwrecks and Vulnerabilia (naufragios) collects scenes of car crashes...
Tropical Vulture is a cross-generational project which highlights the artistic influences between George Kuchar, a Bay Area legend of independent filmmaking, and Mexican artist Miguel Calderón...
The two works in the Kadist collection, Observador Pasivo and 3600 besos por hora by Diaz are culled from a vast compilation of videos and performances for the camera...
Nugroho’s installations and performances have their roots in the shadow puppet rituals in Indonesia, particularly the Javanese Wayang tradition whose essence is in the representation of the shadows...
Dorsky’s pieces included in the Kadist Collection are small still photographs from twelve of his most important films...
Drawing & Print
Ballad of the Unabomber Part I is a painting by Orion Shepherd that features several manila folders stacked in order according to their size, resting atop a grainy hardwood pattern...
Seven family members and a cat all squeezed into the small five-room house, where Motoyuki Daifu grew up in Yokohama...
To the syncopations of a jazzy soundtrack, Korean words in white against a black background flashes between an English dialogue in black text against white ground...
In 1978, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville made the TV series: “France / tour / detour / two / children”, in which they aimed to identify the lifestyle of French people in 12 episodes of 26 minutes each...
Fairy #2 (2011) depicts a surreal scene of roughly assembled household ephemera, potted plants, and a faintly visible figure rendered in thin red line...
Yosuke Takeda gives the viewer brightly colored views, each of which he has searched out and patiently waited for...
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...
In Amantes (Lovers) Juan Carlos points his lens at his own environment, his underground (literally) studio in Havana...
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...
Poetry Light Stool evokes the spirit of Fluxus, the intermedia movement that encouraged artmaking to be simple, fun, and address everyday life...
Primero estaba el mar ( First Was the Sea , 2012) is a system of equivalences between syllables and silhouettes of waveforms cast in cement...
Cinthia Marcelle’s video work Automóvel (2012) re-edits the mundane rhythms of automotive traffic into a highly compelling and seemingly choreographed meditation on sequence, motion, and time...
Contrast to the bustling and unrelenting experience of a city such as Hong Kong, Chris Huen Sin Kan paints the tranquil interiors of his apartment, where he leads a modest and almost hermit-like life...
The Illusion of Everything (2014) follows an unseen pedestrian as he navigates the Australian city of Melbourne’s dense and intricate network of laneways...
“Weight & velocity (cat on router)” is a duo of two humorous photographs of a cat lying on a computer router...
Yosuke Takeda gives the viewer brightly colored views, each of which he has searched out and patiently waited for...
In his White Discharge series (2002 to today), arguably his best known works, Kaneuji assembles old toys and plastic scarps into dramatic mounded heaps and covers the surface with white plastic resin, drawing on allusions to landfills, commodity fetishism, and creative repurposing...
Each day, Yuji Agematsu smokes a pack of cigarettes and wanders the streets of New York City looking for trash...
The artist duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva traveled to Japan for a month to make a series of short 16mm films, often shot in slow-motion...
In Time is a 24-hour video in which the artist rests, hangs and clings onto the minute hand of a large clock, 4 x 4 meters in diameter, arduously counting out a full 24-hour cycle so that the video becomes a functional time-keeping device...
For many years, Nina Könnemann has placed a camera before a billboard situated in the suburb Neukoln in Berlin...
Eileen Quinlan’s abstracted images, like Swipe , rely on the manipulation of photographic materials inside the studio itself, and reject the exterior world for complex interrogations of the medium....
A series of works from 2016 document his neighborhood, replicating buildings and businesses he frequents within four blocks of his New York apartment...
La libertad is a “greca” film, a meander film, with no beginning nor end, weaving together fragments of daily life at the Navarro´s, counting threads and time, wondering and wandering around words as emancipation, labor, and freedom (la libertad), the word that most appeared in our conversations...
What Color is Luke Murphy’s outstanding digital painting that elegantly loops in nonstop motion...