Houck’s Peg and John was made as part of a series of photographic works that capture objects from the artist’s childhood. In this image, drafting materials (pencils, compasses, and protractors) are laid out next to shotgun shell casings. Presenting these objects in juxtaposition but without commentary, Houck offers a partial but interesting glimpse into his own biography.
An MFA graduate from UCLA, John Houck works primarily in the medium of photography and specializes in still-life vignettes. To make his works, Houck arranges an object on a sheet of paper, photographs, and prints it, then places that print back into a new composition, repeating the process again and again until arriving at an aggregate image. The layers appear to be digitally altered, but he does not utilize any postproduction interventions. But Houck is not a purist by any means; he is significantly influenced by his professional experience as a computer programmer, and his artistic methodology mirrors a kind of algorithmic code. By referencing a conventional artistic genre through an iterative and contingent process, Houck offers up photography as a mode of thought.
Untitled #242 is part of Houck’s Aggregates Series, which uses digital tools to manipulate chosen sets and pairs of colors, creating colorful index sheets, bathed in colors and lines...
Dorsky’s pieces included in the Kadist Collection are small still photographs from twelve of his most important films...
The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization...
Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters...
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...
Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage...
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...
Last Postcards is a series of three small double-sided paintings on plywood in which Biernoff imagines the last communications from explorers lost in the wilderness...
Long Long Live (2013) takes the viewer to the setting of the Oasis Villa on Green Island, once a reform and re-education prison to house political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period...
The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations...
It may take a minute to recognize the background of New Fall Lineup – the colors are tweaked into a world of cartoon and candy, and it is covered by leaping energetic figures and flying squirrels...
Central Station, Alignment, and Argument are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...
Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht...
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...
Calle’s drawings all inhabit received forms but alter them to call attention to specific qualities...
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 the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...