Sculpture (Sculpture)

Starting with Bruce Nauman’s iconic artwork, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) , Mungo Thomson’s neon sign is one of a series that replaces Nauman’s quixotic mini-manifesto with aphorisms from ‘recovery’ culture, especially those made popular by alcoholics anonymous. Thomson is referencing the lore that Nauman’s work (the first of many neons he’d make in the following years) had been inspired by a neon beer sign found in a corner-store in San Francisco that he used as his studio in the late 60s. This particular work has a self-critical subtext, as it also suggests the act of using another artist’s work, in an endless spiral of influence, is akin to a form of insanity.

Installation (Installation)

The work is a speech composed of excerpts from autobiographies of well-known political characters. From each book an excerpts that describes a childhood event and one that describes a political event or statement was selected. The former, in most cases, functions as an alibi or explanation of the latter.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Flight Rehearsals focuses on Subbaiah’s desire to fly as a means to highlight the relationship between human ambition and limitations of the physical world. The video presents philosophical explorations of the human desire to defy gravity and time. The minimalist set of a table highlights the intention and persistence of the protagonist rather than technological innovation.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Perpetual Motion (2005) the seemingly erratic flight of the bright orange Monarch butterfly—filmed in its winter habitat of Michoacán, Mexico—is intensified by the artist’s editing in which frames are randomly dropped and the film is sped up. As a result, the butterflies become hyper-real and animated in appearance. The manipulated footage is presented in a video wall of nine monitors, where the butterflies flit from screen to screen, in a room bathed in vivid orange light.

Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world. Patches of canvas cover parts of this otherwise representational photograph and ask the viewer to consider the role that editing and play in our perception of the urban landscape and modernity.