Blindseye Arranger (Max) (2013) features a greyscale arrangement of rudimentary shapes layered atop one another like a dense cluster of wood block prints, the juxtaposition of sharp lines and acute angles creating an abstracted field of rectangular and triangulated forms composed as if in a cubist landscape. As the video progresses, however, a disembodied hand begins to move these forms, animating a pictorial frame that was previously still. The hand – ostensibly the “arranger” of the works title – functions as a metonym of the artist’s hand, quite literally bringing a motionless work to life. The hand in Blindseye Arranger , though, also signals a shift towards the performative, functioning as a reminder that all works of art are created by a maker’s “hand” and, in such, are never fully separate from the context in which they are made. Bress’s gesture towards interdisciplinarity in his work, by extension, signals an important moment in which questions of medium-specificity give way to more trenchant inquiries into notions of authorship and creative process.
Although originally trained in filmmaking and animation, Brian Bress explores the influence of pictorial traditions on contemporary media-based practices. His single-shot videos utilize painterly effects such as geometric abstraction to create visual compositions that blur presumed boundaries between contemporary media-based work and more traditional disciplines such as sculpture and painting. His work is deliberately processed-based and his videos, by extension, explore how visual motifs “evolve” over time through as a viewer engages with a given object or image. Animated figures and actors – such as disembodied hands – disrupt these seemingly still frames, repositioning these works in the context of film while also suggesting the presence of the artist’s hand. Bress’s videos may seem overtly indebted to creative lineages, and his images frequently border on the surreal. But in gesturing towards past works, his videos signal the emergence of creative practices enabled through technological advancements while also offering a meditation on a durational aesthetics privileged in media-based work.
Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition...
For Untitled, Caesar encased recycled objects such as scraps of plywood, paper or cloth in resin and then cut and reassembled the pieces into abstract forms...
This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat...
In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel...
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...
Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city...
Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
War Footage is a series of wall-mounted works composed of 16mm film leader, tightly bound to flag-shaped panels by the artist...
In Ante la imagen (Before the Image, 2009) Muñoz continues to explore the power of a photograph to live up to the memory of a specific person...
Through a semi-fictional approach, Extrastellar Evaluations envisions a version of history in which alien inhabitants, the Lemurians, lived among humans under the guise of various renowned conceptual and minimal artists in the 1960s (Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, and James Turrell to name a few)...
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site...