Office Work
2018 - Sculpture (Sculpture)
Dimensions variable
Walead Beshty
Office Work by Walead Beshty consists of a partially deconstructed desktop monitor screen, cleanly speared through its center onto a metal pole. Despite its dismantled form, the screen still functions, a simple, mountain-range desktop background clearly visible with no distortion. As with much of Beshty’s work, Office Work thematizes its own construction, in this case, through a clearly deconstructive action that preserves the technological ontology present through the monitor. Rather than engage in outright destruction, Beshty carefully articulates the inner workings of the monitor outwards, alluding to the near violence of his action through the screen’s stark impalement. The work exists uneasily between display and destruction, disputing singularly positivist notions of constructing art.
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.
Colors:
Related works featuring themes of: » Abstract Photography, » Color Photography, » Cultural Commentary, » Documentary Photography
© » KADIST
Luisa Lambri
2007Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light...
© » KADIST
Wolfgang Tillmans
2017Wolfgang 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...
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2012Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
© » KADIST
Lynn Hershman Leeson
2007Lynn 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...
© » KADIST
Sharon Lockhart
2008Lockhart’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...
© » KADIST
Du Zhenjun
2010The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
© » APERTURE
An-My LE
For the past two decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling....
© » KADIST
Du Zhenjun
2010The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
© » KADIST
Piero Golia
2007Golia’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...
© » KADIST
Sharon Lockhart
2008Lockhart’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...
© » KADIST
Yee I-Lann
2013Sarcastically 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...
© » KADIST
An-My LE
2010The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture...
© » KADIST
Glenn Ligon
2000Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
© » KADIST
Luisa Lambri
2002Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California...
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2012Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...
© » KADIST
Lynn Hershman Leeson
2017Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...
© » KADIST
Yee I-Lann
20207-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...
© » KADIST
Lynn Hershman Leeson
2016Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...