Black Curl (CMY/Five Magnet: Irvine, California, March 25, 2010, Fujicolor Cyrstal Archive Super Type C, EM No 165-021, 05910) is a visually compelling photogram. Bold shapes, and the breaks between them, create a rhythm and compose an engaging abstract image. At the same time, the work deals with the conditions of the photograph’s manufacture. The literal production of a photograph—the process of photo developing and printing—is the work’s subject, and Beshty slyly points to the ways in which these material processes possess their own aesthetic appeal and content.
Artist and writer Walead Beshty examines the processes of his own multidisciplinary (though primarily photographic) work’s production, linking these processes to global issues including human migration,displacement, and technology. His works, oftentimes visually abstracted, argue for their own production as a process of transformation, emphasizing an expansive array of actions and methods through which art can be structurally transformed or produced. In this way, by examining the matrix of production surrounding his individual artworks, Beshty’s introspection also expands outward onto a complex field of vectors connecting actions, subjects, structures, and forms. Beshty explores the limitations and possibilities of his mediums, which include photography, light, metal, glass, cardboard, and, often, distance. Often striking in their visual presence, his work reflects the movement of images and objects, both in a literal sense and in terms of the way that ideas and materials are circulated and exchanged. They also convey another narrative: the history and the processes that construct both the world and his art.
Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light...
Wolfgang Tillmans initiated the ongoing series Faltenwurf in 1989, representing compositions of unused clothing, with special attention paid to the ways in which they drape and fold...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California results from Lockhart’s prolonged investigation of an agricultural center and community...
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
Gypsy shows an ambivalent scene, in which broken blinds and its unsmiling subject are balanced with the stilllife plentitude of watermelon slices and the beautifully lit nudity of the sitter...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor, through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall...
Although best known as a provocateur and portraitist, Opie also photographs landscapes, cityscapes, and architecture...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
While Untitled (Shuffle) presents the same formal characteristics as the rest of Berman’s verifax collages, this constellation of specific images inside the radio’s frames—the Star of David, Hebrew characters, biblical animals—have Jewish symbolism and attest to the artist’s lasting obsession with the kabala...
Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...