In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point. Calling up the unknown intimacies of these objects, McMillian upends their usual orientation, placing them directly on the wall to serve as paintings, rather than covers. Layering over the repurposed textiles with hardware store paint, McMillian transforms the sheets into canvases, creating abstract landscapes on top of the traces of human bodies intact in the fabric. His vibrant red composition from 2013 slips and drips from its edges onto the floor, with figure and ground evoking different scales of representation—the zoomed out, depopulated landscape created by the paint, and the human-scaled intimacy of the bedsheets.
Rodney McMillian works in many modes, creating sculptures, paintings, videos, performances, and installations that speak to the lived experiences of individuals and communities in the United States. Interested in the points at which larger systems and histories cross over into the personal, McMillian’s work seeks to address issues of race, gender, power, and class.
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...
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...
Telescopic Pole is an adjustable telescopic pole that extends vertically from floor to ceiling and is held up by its own internal pressure...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees...
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...
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...
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...
The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...
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 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...
This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series...
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...
Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct...
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....
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...
A painting reminiscent of a certain “naive primitivism,” Untitled (Colors) and Untitled (Ghost) are representative of McCarthy’s work...