68 min 30
This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013. These videos show several participants from different backgrounds gathering to create and object or an action. For this video, he brought together five Japanese poets from different movements and styles. It is very clear and more perceptible in this project than in others of the series (amongst which hairdressers in San Francisco and potters in China are brought together), that it is difficult to leave space to the others. Considered for a long time as the symbol of ultimate creation, the composition of a poem is an extremely personal activity. Japanese society is often seen as very individualistic. Here, Tanaka presents us with the utopia of a micro community, which could be the plinth to the creation of a larger community. Documenting the production process is also a rebellious act against the result or the object itself. Incidentally, the installation is also composed of four drawing-poems, all different, without one ideal or perfect result.
Koki Tanaka is part of a generation of Japanese artists whose work responded to the economic recession and limited opportunities that beset their country in the early 2000s. Instead of creating monuments, these artists focused on everyday life, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary by stimulating moments of perceptual awakening. Their social critique was enacted through the spectacular and unexpected combination of materials, humor, and simple actions. Working primarily with found objects and video, Tanaka’s practice reveals hidden links between object and action.
MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...
While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves...
Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct...
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...
A painting reminiscent of a certain “naive primitivism,” Untitled (Colors) and Untitled (Ghost) are representative of McCarthy’s work...
Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees...
In Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012), Tossin documents the remains of Henry Ford’s rubber enterprise Fordlândia, built in 1928 in the Brazilian Amazon to export cultivated rubber for the booming automobile industry...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
After being cast, the resulting resin block used in JCA-25-SC was cut into thin slices obtaining a series of rectangular shapes that resemble ceramic tiles...
Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining....
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...
Her 2016 video installation quotes the sitcom-as-form and also draws from a 1907 comedic short, Laughing Gas...
The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
In her 2011 webcam video, Sickhands , Cortright poses before her in-computer camera, as her hands, hair, and body begin waving and rippling vertically across the screen, distorted by software effects...
Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture...
Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock...
Miljohn Ruperto’s high-definition video Janus takes its name from the two-faced Roman god of duality and transitions, of beginnings and endings, gates and doorways...