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...
Calle’s drawings all inhabit received forms but alter them to call attention to specific qualities...
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...
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...
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...
Conrad Ruiz loves to paint subjects related to the “boy zone”: video games, weapons, games, science fiction, fantasy, and special effects...
Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger was Farmer’s first kinetic sculpture that added a cinematic character to an “ever-reconfiguring play presented in real time.” The assembly of various objects and props on top of a large platform constitutes not only a work, but, to a certain extent, a show in itself...
Central Station, Alignment, and Argument are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...
In her recent work, Biernoff is interested in investigating fictions and fantasies embedded in the remnants of consumer culture (for example magazines) or through ephemera such as postcards and old photographs...
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...
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...
Though the title might suggest an Adonis, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Swimmer (2012) is a squat, jolly man with a protuberant belly...
Untitled (Women) (2011) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity...
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...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...