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. Further, Bornstein suggests that within a massive and mercurial social network that often places value arbitrarily, any worthless mass-market products can be turned into coveted objects via absurd relations and vice versa.
Jennifer Bornstein’s works range from performance, conceptual photography, film, drawing, and etchings to curatorial practice. By foregrounding the self-constructed nature of narrative and subjectivity, Bornstein’s practice is a constant rethinking of relations, both social and historical—but not so much in terms of negation and rupture, but rather connection, mutuality, and reintegration.
In the work titled The Glossies (1980), an affinity for photography manifested itself before McCollum actually began to use photography as a medium...
Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape...
Ammo Bunker (2009) is a multipart installation that includes large-scale wall prints and an architectural model...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture...
Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner...
Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall...
In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...
This series of small drawings is executed with varying materials—pen, ink, colored pencil, charcoal, and masking tape—on architect’s tracing paper...
In Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012), Tossin documents the remains of Henry Ford’s rubber enterprise Fordlândia, built in 1928 in the Brazilian Amazon to export cultivated rubber for the booming automobile industry...
7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...
Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors...
Compositions such as Tree on Keystone (2011) become hyperreal versions of their real-world equivalents...
Behind the simplicity and beauty of this untitled photograph of a brilliantly-colored flowerbed by Félix González-Torres are two remarkable stories of love, loss, and resilience...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...