John Houck’s brown- , sienna- and golden-toned composition, Untitled #185, 65, 535 combinations of a 2×2 grid, 16 colors , features densely packed lines of color moving diagonally across the creased page. Houck uses a series of self-designed software programs to create these intricate grids of color and line, riffing off of Sol LeWitt, perhaps, in a digital age. Houck takes the output of these programs and then manipulates them manually, creasing the pages of the index print, and then re-photographing them. In the end, this series of Aggregates—as the series is called—presents a synthesis of digital and analogue methods that toy with the 2-dimensional grid that underpins an entire digital world.
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...
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...
The Last Post was inspired by Sikander’s ongoing interest in the colonial history of the sub-continent and the British opium trade with China...
In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...
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...
Johanna Calle’s Abece “K” (2011) is part of a series of drawings (compiled into an artist book called Abece ) based on the alphabet...
Gypsy shows an ambivalent scene, in which broken blinds and its unsmiling subject are balanced with the stilllife plentitude of watermelon slices and the beautifully lit nudity of the sitter...
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...
Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...
Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...
Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, and politics through everyday interventions...
Braga’s video work Provisão (2009) opens with a still shot of a clearing in a forest, shoots of grass emerging from a muddy brown patch of seemingly dry and barren earth...
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...
Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination...