In her masterpiece 8 Possible Beginnings or The Creation of African-America , Walker unravels just that, the story of struggle, oppression, escape and the complexities of power dynamics in the history following slave trade in America. Her use of contour and silhouette accentuate emotion with rigor, she reduces the narrative to black and white as gruesome acts of sex and violence address trauma, fear and suffering through a majestic play of shadow and light.
Kara E. Walker is a monumental American artist whose work probes the tarnished history of race in America, as well as that of gender, and sexual identity. Walker works in sculpture, collage, mixed media, drawing, graphic imagery and moving image/animation. Her iconic cutout silhouettes sample fragments of folklore as well as recorded history, as she often shows stereotypical depictions of African Americans as portrayed in history books in shockingly graphic yet accurate situations. She elegantly presents a problematic past, seduced by the medium yet wrought by unsettled emotion.
Memorial for intersections #2 (2013) is a minimalist, black metallic structure that contains the brightly colored translucent circles, triangles, rectangles, and squares that originally were presented in Pica’s performance work A ? B ? C (2013)...
Poised with tool in hand, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Carpenter (2012) reaches forward, toward his workbench...
John Houck’s multi-layered photographic compositions immortalize nostalgic objects from the artist’s childhood, manipulated in the studio and in post-production into unreal still-life arrangements...
Itch explores the relationship between technology and daily human experience with a motorized arm that extends from within the gallery’s wall, moving up and down while holding a projector that shows a desperately scratching pair of hands....
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...
Calle’s drawings all inhabit received forms but alter them to call attention to specific qualities...
Sign #1 , Sign #2 , Sign #3 were included in “Found Object Assembly”, Copeland’s 2009 solo show at Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
Her 2016 video installation quotes the sitcom-as-form and also draws from a 1907 comedic short, Laughing Gas...
Catherine Opie’s candid photograph Cathy (bed Self-portrait) (1987) shows the artist atop a bed wearing a negligee and a dildo; the latter is attached to a whip that she holds in her teeth...
The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television...
Although seemingly unadorned at first glance, Yang Xinguang’s sculptural work Phenomena (2009) employs minimalist aesthetics as a means of gesturing towards the various commonalities and conflicts between civilization and the natural world...
Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage...
Malani draws upon her personal experience of the violent legacy of colonialism and de-colonization in India in this personal narrative that was shown as a colossal six channel video installation at dOCUMENTA (13), but is here adapted to single channel...
In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
Although best known as a provocateur and portraitist, Opie also photographs landscapes, cityscapes, and architecture...
Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, and politics through everyday interventions...