Photography (Photography)

Sam Contis’s photographs explore the relationship of bodies to landscape, and the shifting nature of gender identity and expression. Oil is part of a photographic series Contis made at Deep Springs College, one of the United States’s last all-male institutions of higher learning, located in a remote desert valley on the California–Nevada border. Oil features a hand in front of an open hood of a car, checking the oil.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Fig. 33. 9 Your Love is a King by Yeni Mao is a sculpture made of blackened steel, brass, glazed ceramic, and leather.

Photography (Photography)

In 2015, while in residence at the Jatiwangi Art Factory (JaF) located in the village of Jatisura in Jatiwangi, West Java, Indonesia, Togar initiated the Jatiwangi Cup in which the artist, together with communities in the area, established an annual bodybuilding contest. The area is renowned for its roof tile factories, and the cup aims to celebrate the factory worker’s physiques, sculpted by intense, daily, physical labor. Togar based the idea of the cup on the simple notion of collectivity.

Photography (Photography)

Sam Contis’s photographs explore the relationship of bodies to landscape, and the shifting nature of gender identity and expression. Horseback is part of a photographic series Contis made at Deep Springs College, one of the United States’s last all-male institutions of higher learning, located in a remote desert valley on the California–Nevada border. Horseback is a black and white photograph that depicts the arched shoulders of a horse, its slick mane splayed across its neck.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Diego Bianchi’s main concern is distorting straight lines, both literally and metaphorically. To him, deviation is the only feasible strategy to allow the unexpected to happen, making space for semantic turns, impossible encounters, and dissolving binaries. The bodily dimension appears in his art both as disturbance of the senses and perception, and as research into processes of consumerism, oppression, decomposition, and destruction.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Alka domo by Seba Calfuqueo is a performative video work that recontextualizes a story about Caupolicán, the Mapuche toki (meaning symbol of strength and perseverance in the face of adversity). Caupolicán was elected military leader by the Mapuche people of Chile after successfully completing the challenge of holding a log on his shoulders for two days. Caupolicán led the Mapuche army in the first uprising against the Spanish conquistadors from 1553 to 1558.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Shaun Leonardo uses his own body to communicate and portray imagery. In his film Bull in the Ring , hyper-masculine images of physicality are staged at the expense of his own physical comfort. The function of the male body has long been a signifier of self-worth and the body affirms and legitimizes feelings of control and agency over environment.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A Splinter (Study for Painting) is a large graphite work on paper by Hernan Bas that was intended as a study for a later painting. The composition features three unfinished figures, all of whom appear to be observing something unrendered or external to the picture plane. Around the group of figures roughly framed by the outline of a triangle, is a frenzy of loose marks and smudged lines that juxtapose the delicate features of the figures’ faces.

Photography (Photography)

In 2015, while in residence at the Jatiwangi Art Factory (JaF) located in the village of Jatisura in Jatiwangi, West Java, Indonesia, Togar initiated the Jatiwangi Cup in which the artist, together with communities in the area, established an annual bodybuilding contest. The area is renowned for its roof tile factories, and the cup aims to celebrate the factory worker’s physiques, sculpted by intense, daily, physical labor. Togar based the idea of the cup on the simple notion of collectivity.

Photography (Photography)

The photographic work Lowrider Builder and Child is a companion piece to the video Hydroforce , which features Cohen in the late stage of her pregnancy posing atop a German car that she transformed into a lowrider in a period of ten years. While in Hydroforce we see the artist pregnant, Lowrider Builder and Child features the artist’s newborn by her side. In the image, the positioning of Cohen’s body, together with the tranquil, idyllic nature of the site in which she reclines to breastfeed her baby — with the gentle light gleaming as it bounces off the hood of her car — is a nod to classical reclining nude paintings, which invariably portray female subjects.

Photography (Photography)

In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form. For Untitled (Men) (2011), he snipped from magazines and textbooks pictures of handsome or famous men, from the ancient Greek to the modern. Arranged in a tableau, lit theatrically, and rephotographed, the two-dimensional figures have an embodied presence.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor. The series riffs on previous investigations by the artist such as his meticulous depictions of masculine political figures, which included a headless J. Edgar Hoover and a Hitler head floating vulnerably in the center of a white expanse (Hitler’s iconic mustache was crafted from the artist’s pubic hair). Rendered in soft graphite, the imposing Knights embody the ostensibly conflicting ideals of chivalrous deference and invulnerable masculinity.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment. However, Kirk’s passive pose doesn’t so much suggest the aftermath of a battle as it does heavy contemplation, depression, or utter despair. Captain X is part of a series of paintings depicting various Star Trek characters who are stricken with human emotion-—a tactic that diminishes the mythological grandeur associated with this heroic captain and his indefatigable crew.