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. But at the time that it was being planted and picked by slaves in the United States, was severely abrasive and would lacerate the hands of the slaves dramatically. Not to mention the physical labor involved in picking cotton out in the sweltering hot fields for inhumane periods of time, and the frequent physical abuse endured by slaves in the process. This image, culled from the archives of Jive magazine in San Francisco, and blown up to a pixelated scale therefore demands not only that we confront the history of slavery and racism in the US, but does so by presenting a formal contradiction of a material that appears seductive, glamorous, and ornamental, but of a subject that represents extreme violence and oppression.
Employing the visual language and terminology of mass media, and appropriating symbols and images from popular culture, Hank Willis Thomas’ work seeks to question and subvert established definitions and positions with regards to personal identity and the narrative of race. Working across installation, photography, video, and media work, Thomas maintains his photo conceptualist roots, primarily taking source material from found photographs and archives. These images form the basis from which the artist seeks to uncover the fallacies that history claims as truth. His work illustrates how the way history is represented and consumed reinforces generalizations surrounding identity, gender, race and ethnicity, and that as an artist he has an opportunity to expose or to revise those histories from the points of view of the oppressed.
Brent Sikkema, the Manhattan art dealer renowned for representing artists such as Jeffrey Gibson and Kara Walker found dead The post Brent Sikkema – Visionary Art Dealer Of Jeffrey Gibson And Kara Walker Murdered appeared first on Artlyst ....
As she traces the same shape again and again, Ojih Odutola’s lines become darker and deeper, sometimes pushed to the point where their blackness becomes luminous...
The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits...
For Immersion , Harun Farocki went to visit a research centre near Seattle specialized in the development of virtual realities and computer simulations...
Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
Untitled (Wall Street’s Chosen Few…) is typical of Pettibon’s drawings in which fragments of text and image are united, but yet gaps remain in their signification...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape...
Barbara Kasten’s Studio Construct 51 depicts an abstract still life: a greyscale photograph of clear translucent panes assembled into geometric forms, the hard lines of their edges converging and bisecting at various points...
The Nightwatch , which is an ironic reference to the celebrated painting by Rembrandt, follows the course of a fox wandering among the celebrated collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London...
This series of small drawings is executed with varying materials—pen, ink, colored pencil, charcoal, and masking tape—on architect’s tracing paper...
The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history...
Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...