Collage Archives - longlistshort

NYC Art Shows- Laura Owens at Matthew Marks Gallery

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film

Apr 162025

The images above are of two sections of Laura Owens’s immersive multi-media exhibition on view in two of Matthew Marks locations. It’s a lot to take in with so many details in the layered paintings and throughout the various rooms.

Walking through a door to the brightly colored green of the second room gives the feeling of entering a magical secret world, an impression that continues throughout the galleries. Adding to this is a humorous video tucked away in a tiny space behind another door, and small panels that open from the walls revealing additional paintings. In the other gallery location are more rooms, including one with boxes containing various items and handmade books. It’s an overwhelming but wonderful show best seen in person.

From the gallery-

Laura Owens began exhibiting her work in the mid-1990s and quickly became known for her innovative approach to painting. Her work synthesizes traditional methods with unconventional ones, including printmaking and digital manipulation, to create destabilizing illusions of depth, extending her paintings beyond the confines of the canvas into three-dimensional space. Her paintings are often self-referential and draw extensively from art history, decorative arts, and craft traditions, as well as mass media and personal anecdotes.

The exhibition demonstrates Owens’s both meticulous and experimental approach to artmaking. Each element is hand-made in the artist’s studio through labor-intensive processes pioneered by Owens. A single panel may have over one hundred fifty layers of hand-printed silkscreen, on top of which Owens then paints further. The exhibition also includes kinetic elements, moving pieces within the artworks that continually point to their spatial and temporal contexts. “Though Owens is a master of composition, and the dynamism of her works has much to do with her sophisticated resolution of the problems that occur within the picture plane, it is at the edges, relations to external aspects such as architecture, interior space, landscape, time, geography, subject matter, style, and discipline, that their restlessness is found,” Kirsty Bell has written. “There is always more room to be surprised.”

This exhibition closes 4/19/25.

NYC Art Shows- Suellen Rocca at Matthew Marks

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Design, Drawing, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture

Apr 162025

“Night”, 2014, Oil on canvas

“Ocean Ladies”, 1988, Oil on canvas

“Untitled”, 1964, Oil on canvas

Currently on view at Matthew Marks Gallery is Good Things and Bad Things, an exhibition of paintings, drawings and objects by the late Suellen Rocca. The collection highlights the artist’s use of a variety of styles throughout her career to express similar themes.

From the gallery-

Suellen Rocca’s work is marked by dream-like ambient landscapes filled with pictograms arranged in loose grids. She drew inspiration from various types of “picture writing,” such as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, advertisements, and children’s activity books. Fantastical, witty, and deeply personal, Rocca’s unique visual language comprises a collection of images from her life, including 1950s dollhouse furniture, jewelers’ catalogs, bodily sensations, and the work of artists such as Marc Chagall and Max Beckmann. Rocca combined these symbols in eccentric compositions. As one critic observed, “Rocca offers up mysterious mystical visions for contemplation.”

The exhibition, whose title, Good Things and Bad Things, is borrowed from one of Rocca’s paintings, includes two large-scale paintings made in 1964. In one painting, palm trees, shoes, and gold rings with gemstones emerge from a turquoise ground. Another painting presents repeating images of Santa Claus, dancing couples, and winter landscapes. Later canvases envision interior worlds in electrifying fields of vibrant color.

Purses were also an important motif for Rocca, which she first developed from images in a 1940s manual on how to crochet purses. For Rocca, they were examples of “the cultural icons of beauty and romance expressed by the media that promised happiness to young women of that generation.” In the late 1960s, Rocca expanded this imagery to sculpture and began painting on purses. Describing Rocca’s sculpture Purse Curse (1968), Dan Nadel has written, “it reminds me of a world of images that did not have double meanings, and of the fantasy of love, pure and simple. But the purse also conceals. What’s inside?”

This exhibition closes 4/19/25.

NYC Art Shows- Camille Henrot at Hauser & Wirth

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Glasswork, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture

Apr 102025

For Camille Henrot’s imaginative installation for A Number of Things at Hauser & Wirth, a variety of sculptures, including several from her Abacus series, are surrounded by paintings from her Dos and Don’ts series. There’s a playfulness to both, but something a bit darker too. Walking on the soft floor among the sculptures there is a feeling of childlike wonder, while at the same time, in combination with the paintings, you are reminded of the rules and restrictions that are imposed on us, starting when we are very young, and how they become more oppressive with age.

From the gallery’s press release-

Evoking children’s developmental tools, shoes, distorted graphs and counting devices, new large-scale bronze sculptures from the artist’s ‘Abacus’ series (2024)—presented alongside recent smaller-scaled works—address the friction between a nascent sense of imagination and society’s systems of signs. The exhibition will also feature vibrant new paintings from Henrot’s ongoing ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series.

Initiated in 2021, the ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series combines printing, painting and collage techniques where etiquette books become the palimpsest for play with color, gesture, texture and trompe l’oeil. The artworks will emerge from a flooring intervention—conceived and designed with Charlap Hyman & Herrero—that transforms the gallery into a site of sensory experimentation. Henrot’s exhibition vivaciously sets the stage for the arbitrary nature of human behavior to circulate freely between rule and exception.

As viewers enter the gallery, they will be greeted by a pack of dog sculptures tied to a pole, as if left unattended by their walker. Shaped from steel wool, aluminum sheets, carved wood, wax, chain and other unexpected materials, Henrot’s creatures speak to the ever-unfolding effects of human design and domestication. As an extension of Henrot’s ongoing interest in relationships of dependency, the dogs stand in as the ultimate image of attachment.

Henrot’s latest ‘Abacus’ sculptures unite the utilitarianism of the ancient calculating tool with the arches and spirals of a children’s bead maze—a toy popularized in the 1980s as a heuristic diversion in pediatric waiting rooms and nursery schools. Through these formal associations, an instinctive sense of play collides with the learned impulse to search out patterns and impose order. With their biomorphic contours, opaline patinas and quadruped or biped anatomies, these works seem charged with a lifeforce of their own. Hovering between pure abstraction and their multivalent referents, Henrot’s bronzes invite our unfettered, sensuous engagement, even as they allude to the symbolic systems that tyrannize our imaginations.

Behavioral conditioning is a central concern of Henrot’s ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series. These richly layered paintings consider the idea of ‘etiquette’ as it relates to society at large: its codes of conduct, laws and notions of authority, civility and conformity. The works feature collaged fragments of invoices from an embryology lab; a note conjugating the German verb ‘to be;’ dental X-rays; digital error messages; children’s school homework; and to-do lists, among other things. Together, they build on Henrot’s interest in making sense of the urge to organize and categorize information—a theme that has been prevalent in her practice since her groundbreaking film ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013). The ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series distorts its source material to reveal the constructed, performative nature of any social identity, while acknowledging the emotional security that behavioral mimicry and groupthink can provide.

As the exhibition’s almost childlike title suggests, ‘A Number of Things’ brings together a disparate but related group of works that collectively address the enormously difficult task that is living, learning and growing in society. With tenderness for the most banal traces of our existences, Henrot offers a meditation on the competing impulses to both integrate and resist the unquestioned structures of society in our everyday lives.

‘There’s a reason why, in English, the word ‘politics,’ ‘polite’ and ‘police’ all sound the same—they are all derived from the Greek word polis or city, the Latin equivalent is civitas, which also gives us ‘civility,’ ‘civic’ and a certain modern understanding of ‘civilization.’

—David Graeber, ‘The Dawn of Everything’ (2021)

In the video walkthrough with Henrot (below) she discusses many of the inspirations for the work.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

NYC Art Shows- Lyne Lapointe at Jack Shainman Gallery

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Fiber Arts, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture

Apr 082025

“Hemisphere”, 2024, Wood, ink on paper, hemp, linen, glass beads and frame by the artist

“Corps Astral/ Astral Body”, 2024, Ink, gold leaf, and paper on wood in an artist frame

“In Vitro”, 2024, Ink on paper, hemp, linen, and blown glass eggs mounted on wood in an artist’s frame

“Okinawa”, 2024, Ink on paper, hemp, coral, and sand stars mounted on wood in an artist’s frame

Lyne Lapointe’s works for Becoming Animal, her exhibition of new work at Jack Shainman Gallery, natural and hand made materials add dimension to works focused on the body and its connection to the natural world.

From the gallery-

Inspired by a passage in A Thousand Plateaus, written by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the exhibition title recalls the attitude they describe as being essential to the creative process: ‘becoming animal,’ or, an ability to inhabit different material and ontological perspectives. This phrase philosophically expresses a consistent quality in Lapointe’s work, namely her ability to ‘embody’ her materials—whether it be ink or glass beads, coral or abandoned beehives—by allowing them to retain their own specificity while also fully incorporating them into the pictorial spaces of her figures. Just as Lapointe’s materials contribute to the transformation of her figures, so too do they undergo their own metamorphosis as they are integrated into the compositions, a process that reflects the body’s capacity to adapt and change while still retaining continuity with the past.

Over the past four decades Lapointe has created poetic and materially complex works that consider the corporeal and psychological consequences of existing in a world of uncertainty. Her site-specific installations and architectural interventions created throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in partnership with critic and artist Martha Fleming, established many of these essential thematic concerns. At their core was the role that social spaces play in creating and modifying subjectivity, an experience Lapointe has continued to dissect and explore through other media, including the paintings on paper in this exhibition. Together, they demonstrate her consistent focus on the body and its relationship to external factors, whether they be socially constructed or naturally occurring.

Through research, careful sourcing and sustainable practices, Lapointe has expanded her process to include heterogeneous materials and found objects alike. In Beehives Apiarists (2024), the diptych’s beehives have been affixed to the figures while propolis—a resin-like substance produced by bees and typically used for medicinal purposes—has been used to cover the works entirely. In Mother of Pearl (2024), a large shell has been placed at the center of the figure while pearls punctuate the background. In Vitro (2024) brings together blown glass eggshells, hemp and recycled linens. Lapointe’s method of collecting these items, locating additional materials and preserving their respective histories is a process that metaphorically expresses her long-standing desire to use resources that not only describe our world, but that remind us of its innate worth and beauty and thus of our own as well.

By incorporating objects found in nature and the home, Lapointe creates moments that reimagine the body and place it in a point of transition. At times between genders, while at others void of identity altogether, her figures always question the viability of personal expression in our current socio-political context. Though typically characterized by vulnerability and fragility, they also and just as often embody a position of triumphant resistance to a world that seeks to restrict gender expression, categorize sexuality and stigmatize ‘otherness.’ When responding to a world of danger and hostility her figures can don protective armor, as in Black Billed Cuckoo / Magnolia Grandiflora (2023) and Okinawa (2024). In the series The Head and the Body (2024) Lapointe renders each figure in both deep black ink and shimmering gold leaf, suggesting an inner psychological world that the materials merely hint at. This is a world where resilience and radiance take form as proffered by the gold leaf, while tenacity, seen in the deep opacity and outward reaching gesture of the inked figure, takes root.

Though Lapointe’s practice has often centered femininity and womanhood in its many personal and social forms, in Becoming Animal she has gone one step further by creating figures that appear genderless, or which seem to exist outside of such rigid codification entirely. The found objects she uses to characterize these anonymous forms also signify their environmental context and invite viewers to consider the works through the lens of environmentalism. By encouraging each figure to occupy multiple ontological perspectives at once, Lapointe creates both a literal and conceptual connection to the construction of the works themselves. They straddle the line between painting, sculpture and collage, while finding ways to express the body in a fugue state through her singular craftsmanship and mastery of materials—or as Deleuze and Guattari write, they seek to ‘un-human the human.’

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

Mar 262025

Jennie C. Jones, “Fluid Red Tone (in the break)”, 2022, Architectural felt, acoustic panel, and acrylic on canvas (left) and Steve Wolfe, “Untitled (Bookends)”, 1990, Bronze, lacquer (bottom right)

Unrecorded Betsi-Nzaman artist, Fang peoples Male Reliquary Guardian Figure (Eyema Byeri), 19th Century Wood, metal, pigment (center sculpture), Andy Warhol, “Close Cover Before Striking”, 1962 Acrylic and collage on linen, (right) and Judy Linn “James Joyce on 23rd st.”, early 1970s, Archival pigment print (on window)

Ronny Quevedo, “body and soul (Reflection Eternal)”, 2022, Pattern paper, gold leaf, and metal leaf on muslin (left) and Christian Marclay and Steve Wolfe, “La Voix Humaine”, 1991, Wood console, oil and screenprint on aluminum (right)

Larry Wolhandler, “Bust of James Baldwin”, 1975, Bronze, and Rudolf Stingel, “Untitled”, 2016, Electroformed copper, plated nickel, stainless steel frame (right)

Medardo Rosso, “Rieuse”, 1890, Wax on plaster, and picture of Joan Didion

Ellen Gallagher “DeLuxe”, 2004–2005 Grid of 60 photogravure, etching, aquatint and drypoints with lithography, screenprint, embossing, tattoo-machine engraving; some with additions of plasticine, watercolor, pomade and toy eyeballs

Writer Hilton Als has brought together a wonderful collection of works exploring art and language for The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts at Hill Art Foundation. Quotes from several authors are included alongside the art, adding another dimension to the show.

From the gallery-

This group exhibition presents artists whose work explores the relationships between communication and language. In the curatorial text, Als explains: “for this exhibition, I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists.”

“Writing and erasure have been important sources of inspiration for many of the artists in my family’s collection, including Christopher Wool, Rudolf Stingel, Vija Celmins, and Cy Twombly,” says J. Tomilson Hill, President of the Hill Art Foundation. “Hilton Als has identified a fascinating motif and introduced important loans to illustrate the rich history of these lines of inquiry into the present day.”

In his accompanying essay, Poetics of Silence, Als probes the power of visual art to skirt the written or spoken word. The works included convey “the sense we have when language isn’t working,” evoke “EKGs of rhythm followed by silence, or surrounded by it,” reveal “painting as language’s subtext,” illustrate “what we mean to say as opposed to what gets said,” and “find beauty in the tools that one uses to erase words—and then to make new ones.” He reflects on his own entry into the art world as an art history student at Columbia in the 1980s, and his efforts as a writer and curator to create a democratic “language of perception” that transcends traditional connoisseurship.

The Writing’s on the Wall encompasses a range of mediums, from video installation to printed zine. Artists in the exhibition include Ina Archer, Kevin Beasley, Jared Buckhiester, Vija Celmins, Sarah Charlesworth, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Fang: Betsi-Nzaman, Ellen Gallagher, Joel Gibb and Paul P., Rachel Harrison, Ray Johnson, G.B. Jones and Paul P., Jennie C. Jones, Christopher Knowles, Willem de Kooning, Sherrie Levine, Judy Linn, Christian Marclay, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Claes Oldenburg, Ronny Quevedo, Irving Penn, Umar Rashid, Medardo Rosso, David Salle, Rudolf Stingel, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Steve Wolfe, Larry Wolhandler, and Christopher Wool.

Als’ essay provides not only more information on the show and the art included, but also his own experience of learning about and experiencing art.

Below is a brief excerpt but it is well worth it to read the essay in its entirety.

Part of the experience I hope to evoke here draws a line between language, which is to say active contemplation, and being, which requires nothing more than your presence first and language second (or third). You know what being is. It happens to you all the time. You may be in a museum, or a public park, or sitting dully in your house, with “nothing” on your mind, and then there you are—a kind of walking phenomenology, language-free, but not feeling. In fact, you are suffused with feeling. Your feet are on the ground, and your body, released from the chatter of the everyday, is porous to the surrounding world with its various silences—a world where everything and nothing speaks to you. The clouds; some pictures on a white wall; a beautiful, hitherto-unknown sculpture reaching for eternity; that blank wall standing between you and the wonders of a garden that manages to grow right here in the middle of Manhattan—they all became part of your being, the self that is always on the verge of discovery, if only you can listen to its silences.

Silence says so much, if you listen. (From Marianne Moore’s 1924 poem “Silence”: “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.”) And since I have been a writer all my life, it’s a relief not to think in words sometimes, and to look at pictures, which do not so much deny verbalization but are without language, only the experience of here and now. Sometimes being simply means that we are somewhere, and we are porous to contemplation. When we think about visual culture or production, words aren’t the first things that come to mind. What does is the thing itself. And for this exhibition, I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists. The struggle to speak, to say, to reveal language or an attempt at language—communication—in a visual medium that has a complicated relationship to speech.

Als’ website includes his older writing ,but you can read more of his recent essays and reviews on The New Yorker’s website and he frequently posts on Instagram.

This exhibition closes 3/29/25.

Mar 172025

The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by former New York magazine editor Adam Moss is a fascinating look at the creative processes of several famous artists. Each artist discusses specific works and gives the reader an inside look at how they came about.

The 43 artists included are visual artists, writers, musicians, editors, designers, and many other creative categories. Moss is also an artist and you can see that in his desire to both inform the reader, and to learn for himself, what makes these individuals tick.

Many of the names will be familiar, but these behind the scenes looks are incredibly enlightening. These discussions often also inspired, for me, a deeper dive. I found myself watching videos of Twyla Tharp‘s choreography, reading Guy Talese’s essay and Sheila Heti’s book, listening to Moses Sumney, watching Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and so on, as I progressed through the book.

While some artists will appeal more than others depending on your interests, all of them had something interesting and valuable to say. This book was one of my favorites of 2024.

Feb 212025

Hillary Mushkin, “Groundwater”, 2024, Four-channel video installation, wall drawing, sound and “The River and the Grid”, 2024 Artist’s book: ink, watercolor, graphite, and glue on paper

Woven work by Sarah Rosalena

“Source”, 2023 by Lez Batz (Sandra de la Loza and Jess Gudiel)- Mixed media installation including seventy felt bat masks, baleen whale cardboard puppet, graphic mural and single- channel video

Currently on view at the Armory Center for the Arts is From Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments. For the exhibition, part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, the artists use a variety of materials, cultural practices, and traditions to explore aspects of our changing environment.

From the gallery-

What can seeds tell us about the future? Seeds and the plants that grow from them have provided us with food, clothing, shelter, and medicine for millennia. For just as long, humans have used sciences, technologies, myths, and art to peer into an imagined future. As we stare out toward our own future, one threatened by climate change and complicated by social unrest, the From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments exhibition looks to the seed—such as those seeds that lie at the bottom of the forest floor waiting for the cyclical fire season that promotes new growth and diversity to sprout—for inspiration and guidance on how to navigate current and coming hostile environments.

From the Ground Up presents works by 16 contemporary artists and artist teams who explore diverse technologies, histories of contested spaces, and traditional understandings of nature as they imagine alternative, sustainable futures. Organized for the Armory by curator Irene Georgia Tsatsos, the exhibition bridges familiar distinctions between art and science while exploring practices and traditions that predate contemporary understandings of those disciplines. In this exhibition, artworks, knowledge traditions, and histories converge in space and across time.

Artists in the exhibition- Charmaine Bee, Nikesha Breeze, Carl Cheng, Olivia Chumacero, Beatriz Cortez, Mercedes Dorame, Aroussiak Gabrielian, iris yirei hu, Lez Batz (Sandra de la Loza and Jess Gudiel), Malaqatel Ija, Semillas Viajeras, Seed Travels, Hillary Mushkin, Vick Quezada, Sarah Rosalena, Enid Baxter Ryce, Cielo Saucedo, Marcus Zúñiga

Below are a few additional selections and information on the work from the gallery-

Nikesha Breeze, “Stages of Tectonic Blackness: Blackdom”, 2021, Dual-channel video with sound

Nikesha Breeze (they/them) is a direct descendant of Blackdom, a homesteading community founded by thirteen African Americans near Roswell, New Mexico in 1903 that existed until about 1930. This video portrays a site-specific, collaborative dance ritual that honors the landscape and grieves the transgressions against Black and Indigenous communities at Blackdom.

Enid Baxter Ryce, “Shed (Mapping the Devil’s Half Acre)”, 2024, Mixed media, including hand-printed silk, dried plants, hand-printed cotton, antique tobacco sticks, cherry wood, cedar wood, glass, botanical inks, papers, crates

Enid Baxter Ryce with Luis Camara, “Devil’s Half Acre Tarot”, 2024, Hand-processed botanical pigments on paper

Dried plants such as indigo and woad, handmade books and maps, tarot cards and runes, and glass jars of plant-based pigments are among many tools of early scientific exploration and pre-scientific divination. Enid Baxter Ryce (she/her) has assembled these elements of medieval science into a contemporary witch’s office, adorned with fabrics painted with inks and dyes made from plants she grew from seed.

Aroussiak Gabrielian, “Future Kin”, 2024, Soil, video, sound, ceramics

In Future Kin, Aroussiak Gabriellian (she/her) connects a composting ritual to the life cycles of humans, the biome in our digestive tracts, and the bacterial, fungal, and animal life that emerges from decomposing organic matter. Undulating hands gently caress composted soil, suggesting human engagement, empathy, and awareness of ecological interconnectedness.

iris yirei hu, “mud song dream sequence”, 2024, Video and rammed earth; animation by Shoop Rozario

iris virei hu (she/her) uses diverse media to share her journeys with all living beings, whom she understands to be inextricably linked. Her practice is rooted in “collaborative optimism,” in which trauma can inform healing, solidarity, creativity, and liberating futures for folks who are Indigenous, Black, and people of color.

Olivia Chumacero, “Dispersing Time”, 2024, Plant pigments, ink, organic acrylic, burlap, muslin, manzanita branches, feathers, Cahuilla acorn harvest song

Indigenous cosmology recognizes trees as human relatives. Olivia Chumacero (Rarámuri, she/her) offers a portrait of an oak downed by wind and rain, yet alive with a lush canopy and deep roots. She compares the tree’s resilience to that of Indigenous peoples, whose lines of existence have been disrupted yet not destroyed. Following this exhibition, the piece – which is an offering to seeds – will be buried in the Sequoyah National Forest.

This exhibition closes Sunday, 2/23/25. The gallery is open Fridays 2-6 PM Saturdays and Sundays 1-5 PM.

Los Angeles Art- Barbara Kruger at The Broad

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Collage, Conceptual Art, Design, Los Angeles Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking

Feb 142025

Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (You Are A Very Special Person), 1995, is currently on view at The Broad in Los Angeles, as part of their permanent collection.

Feb 132025

The contemporary artists and designers in Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art at Art Center College of Design, each use different types of data as the basis for work that is both imaginative and informative. This exhibition is part of The Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide programming.

From the gallery-

Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art explores selected works by contemporary artist and designers responding to data’s impact on daily life. The exhibition premise rises from the dawn of Big Data in the early 1990s, which brought with it advancements in the field of data visualization: the practice of representing vast quantities of information to make it understandable and engaging to the public.
In its early forms, data visualization was most often used in map-making and creating statistical graphics, viewed largely as a tool to convey information in the sciences and support analytic reasoning. In recent years the field has become an influential force in contemporary culture, transforming visual literacy in the global cultural landscape.

Seeing the Unseeable considers data in the recent past and present, addressing issues related to data mining and invisible data, data humanism, and data’s relationship to our varied environments. Exploring a critical cultural moment in our relationship with the magnitudes of information that routinely bombard us, works in the exhibition draw attention to issues ranging from the vastness and capabilities of data technologies to the personal, social and humanitarian consequences of data collection and data systems.

Hyojung Seo, “Singapore Weather Data Drawing Series (Wind Direction, Tem-perature, Windspeed) 2022

About the video work by Hyojung Seo–

Singapore Weather Data Drawing Series reconsiders data visualization as it develops beyond mere representation to aestheticization. As the title of the work suggests, this series of data are drawings aimed to build a visual narrative beyond the original scope of the data itself. The weather data drawings generally represent information about Singapore’s weather patterns, while also standing as abstract digital artworks. This visual loosening of data into a series of patterns and movements presents weather statistics thorough a visual sensation rather than a more conventional data visualization design. The essential link is the descriptive title. While the work may abstract Singapore’s weather patterns, the movement and shapes designed by Seo also expand the meaning of the information as a kind of living, organic form.

About the above work by Linnéa Gabriella Spransy–

Described by Spransy as “procedural abstractions,” the paintings shown present an alternative to what may be considered data-driven art. While terms such as “data” and “generative art” are often used to describe digital-based imagery, the artist’s painting method lies at the heart of data and data visualization: number patterns. The Prime Mover paintings demonstrate the intimate working relationship between the artist and pure data. Spransy begins by constructing linear patterns using prime number sequences onto the prepared canvas. From this accumulated form, she then selects areas to pour paint over. After the paint dries, she initiates another pattern that grows around the existing intrusions. This push and pull of structure and chaos creates a field of balance and counterbalance, an ebb and flow between the artist, the numbers, and the seemingly shifting, multiple layers and dimensions of her paintings.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, “Lu, Jack and Carrie (from The Garden of Delights)”, 1998, Archival pigment prints

About the above work by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and Storm Prototype: Cloud Prototype No. 2 and 4, 2006 (the hanging titanium sculptures in the first photo)-

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is recognized for a wide-ranging, multifaceted practice resulting in sculpture, large-scale instal-lations, photography, and video. Ranging in scale from modest to monumental, his works are the result of years of research and achieved working in collaboration with creatives, inventors, and technicians in a vast range of fields, from the physical and life sciences to earth sciences. Lu, Jack and Carrie (from The Garden of Delights) (1998) is comprised of three colorful digital prints: a series of abstractions based on images of DNA samples taken from imaging technologies utilized in genomic mapping and depicting “families” of friends selected in sequence. Storm Prototype: Cloud Prototype Nos. 2 and 4 2006) are hovering spectral forms manifested in three dimensions from the analysis and compilation of real weather data. Additionally, the works are inspired by the artist’s consideration of global migration patterns. These works represent the compulsory flow of nature, whether revealed in the sky, ocean, or over land, impervious to international boundaries.

Giorgia Lupi and Ehren Shorday, “Incroci (Crossings)”, 2022, Black paint on raw canvas

About the above work by Giorgia Lupi and Ehren Shorday–

Described by the artists as data portraits, this collaborative project emerged from Lupi’s observation that “each person’s life may be unique and different, but when seen together, these distinct paths begin to form patterns.” For Incroci, a dataset was created by asking strangers, and their social media circles, to share five dates (day/month/year) representing significant life moments, from the day of their birth up to the year 2022. The project was conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic, which gave weight to the question of what could be considered a significant life moment. Incroci exemplifies the ways in which data visualization design is evolving to a level beyond merely providing an aesthetic framework for data to realizing subtext within the datasets. As Lupi states: “The more ubiquitous data becomes, the more we need to experiment with how to make it unique, contextual, intimate. The way we visualize is crucial because it is the key to translating numbers into concepts we can relate to.”

About the work above by Semiconductor–

Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, aka Semiconductor, have been collaborating for over 25 years working in sound, video, installation and sculpture. Referring to their work as technological sublime, they explore ways of experiencing nature mediated through the languages of science and technology. Spectral Constellations is a series of generative animations, driven by scientific data of young stars. This data, collected by scientists using a method called Spectroscopy, creates an understanding of structures around distant young stars, where gas and dust come together to form planets. Semiconductor have employed this spectral data as a physical material, translating it into rings of light which resemble gradiated discs of planetary and stellar formations. As the data ebbs and flows it introduces a sense of form and motion. Waveforms merge and interfere revealing patterns and rhythms, engaging our human tendency towards pattern recognition. The fragmented LED mosaics provide partial windows from which the spectral data shifts and shimmers.

Fernanda Bertini Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, “Wind Map”, 2012, Interactive software, dimensions variable

About Fernanda Bertini Viégas and Martin Wattenberg‘s Wind Map-

Fernanda Viégas, a computational designer, and Martin Wattenberg, a mathematician and journalist, are known as pioneers in the field of data visualization. Their research has helped define visualization as a discipline and practice, creating interactive and open-source tools for examining a wide range of scientific, social, and artistic questions. Conceived as a personal art project, their iconic work Wind Map culls information from the National Digital Forecast Database, which is maintained by the National Weather Service and available to the public. Continually gathering these forecasts, which are time-stamped and revised each hour, the artists have created a “living portrait” of the wind landscape over the United States. To emphasize the beauty and distinction of this influential work, exhibition curators commissioned a special iteration of Wind Map without the city locations and names. The standard version of this piece remains in the public domain on their website: http://hint.fm/wind/

Laurie Frick, “Moodjam Intense”, 2024 and “Moodjam Mild”, 2024, Abet Laminati samples on ACM panel

About Laurie Frick’s Moodjam Intense and Moodjam Mild-

In her exploration to humanize data, Frick creatively mines information from her own functional and behavioral patterns as part of her art practice. Inspired initially by the daily activity tracking of computer programmer Ben Lipkowitz, Frick began tracking her own sleep with an electroencephalogram headband, expanding it to her husband’s sleep patterns and then others. Initially mapping her moods with color swatches through Mood-jam.com, Frick expanded to track her temperament every few seconds using a combination of heart rate (HRV), facial recognition and galvanic skin response (GSR), assessing her stress, nervousness, and general mood every few seconds. The work shown is an interpretation of this compiled data, using boxes of countertop laminate samples that she sourced during an artist residency at the Headlands Art Center near San Francisco. Moodjam Intense and Moodjam Mild are the resulting gridded works.

Peggy Weil, “77 Cores”, 2024, White Mylar Digital print

About Peggy Weil’s 77 Cores–

Peggy Weil has long been engaged in exploring ways of seeing. Today she continues to inquire the realms of perception, investigating how we see, what we see, and how we can see beyond. When she heard about the Greenland Ice Sheets project which stores 2-mile-long poles of ice samples in meter long cylinders, she was compelled to document them. The ice cores-paleo thermometers holding ash from volcanic eruptions, pollen and environmental gasses-are, to Weil, “deep space holding very deep time.” As such they speak to the notion of the extended landscape: stretched out beyond what we perceive and see, hidden in the atmosphere or the earth underneath our feet. In 77 Cores, images of seventy-seven glacier ice-sheet cores are printed and laid out over twenty-four feet. allowing the viewer to mark time by walking its length.

Sarah Morris “Property Must Be Seen [Sound Graph]”, 2020; “Deviancy is the Essence of Culture [Sound Graph]”, 2020; “You Cannot Keep Love [Sound Graph]”, 2020, Household gloss paint on canvas

About Sarah Morris and the Sound Graph paintings above-

Sarah Morris creates films, paintings, and sculptures based on a wide range of sources, including graphic logos, architectural space, transportation systems and maps, GPS technology, and the movement of people in urban locations. She has said, “I want to map what is going on, these situations we find ourselves in-both physically and philosophically.” The Sound Graph paintings are derived from fragments of conversations and sounds recorded by the artist and translated into hard-edged geometric shapes in vibrant patterns that seem to visually fluctuate. Her interest in incorporating sound into her paintings began when she conceived the film Finite and Infinite Games (2017), titled after the cult philosophy and numbers theory novel by James P. Carse. Morris sees her paintings as being part of a larger self-generating system, always remaining open and allowing for interpretation, motion and change.

Mimi Ọnụọha, “The Library of Missing Data Sets”, 2016; “The Library of Missing Data Sets v2.0”, 2018; “The Library of Missing Data Sets v3.0”, 2022, Mixed Media Installation

Mimi Ọnụọha, “In Absentia”, 2019, 6 risograph prints on paper

About the works above by Mimi Ọnụọha–

The Library of Missing Datasets comprises three filing cabinets filled with folders the reveal unseen biases within the system of data collecting. According to the artist, this work is “a physical repository of those things that have been excluded in a society where so much is collected.” While data-collecting algorithms claim to provide comprehensive information, their vastness hides data-driven forms of inequity: what Ọnụọha considers “algorithmic violence.” Revealing the conditions surrounding invisible data, she “aims] to trouble assumptions baked into the beliefs and technologies that mediate our existences.” In Absentia (2019) presents six risograph prints in the style of twentieth-century African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois’ infographics presented at Exposition Universelle, the Paris World’s Fair, in 1900. Ọnụọha visually quotes from Du Bois to acknowledge his work’s significance and the injustice it has since suffered: the US Department of Labor and Statistics halted publishing of his sociological research on Black rural life in Alabama, claiming it to be too controversial.

Finally, the image above is of work from Refik Anadol’s AI data painting series– California Landscapes.

Refik Anadol is an artist, designer, and leader in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. Utilizing advanced technologies including Al, machine algorithms, and quantum computing, he has become known for large scale, immersive installations that render massive amounts of data into highly dynamic abstractions. The artist’s California Landscape series employs images of California’s national parks. Spawned from a dataset of over 153 million images, the largest dataset of this kind ever to be used for an artwork, the Generative Study works feature images that are recognizable. Yet as these majestic landscapes constantly morph, so does the matter that we conventionally identify as earth and sky. A series of interconnected lines imbue the images with additional references, in this case the algorithm driving this perpetual visual flux. In its varying juxtapositions of nature and technology, this work reminds us of how distinctive our perceptions of each may be.

This exhibition closes 2/15/25.

Jan 032025

Michael Joo, “Noospheres (Composition OG:CR)”, 2024

Cannupa Hanska Luger, “Sovereign”, 2024

Yoshitomo Nara, “A Sinking Island Floating in a Sea Called Space 1 and 2”, 2024

For the group exhibition Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice, Hammer Museum has gathered artists from around the world to present work that addresses environmental and social issues. The exhibition is part of the PST ART: Art and Science Collide programming taking place throughout Southern California.

From the museum about the exhibition-

The confluence of cataclysmic events that marked the year 2020-among them the global COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing economic crisis, the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, and the murder of George Floyd, which gave powerful momentum to Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements-created a rupture. For many, it felt like the end of the world that they had known. Under circumstances of physical and psychological lockdown, the very notion of taking a single breath-an act vital to multispecies existence since time immemorial-took on renewed significance. Breathing as an act of resistance and survival in the face of racial inequity and a global health crisis calls attention to the inextricable link between social and environmental injustice. The often imperceptible but ever growing burden of climate-related tragedies-the thawing cryosphere, extreme heat, flooding, deforestation, radioactive aftermaths of wars, and ocean acidification-has played a direct role in the deterioration of economic conditions and the displacement of populations.

Breath(e) assembles artists from around the world who share concerns about threats to their communities and environments. The exhibition foregrounds an ethical stance that critiques the privileging of the human being as the most significant among all entities and instead values interdependence. Some of the works reassess philosophical assumptions regarding what constitutes the “human,” while others question who speaks on behalf of the rights of nature and how we adjudicate the agency of the earth, trees, air, and oceans. The exhibition also highlights artistic practices that have transformed the cultural tropes of the climate crisis into narratives of resilience, transformation, renewal, and coexistence. These narratives are explored through various means: restoring balance and belonging to the land through speculative models for future survival; exploring the regenerative capacities of waste through structural transformations in life cycles; making visible the impact of anthropogenic violence on our bodies over time; the passing down of living knowledge that promotes biodiversity through multiple generations; giving voice to youth and empowering them with food sovereignty; and the radical presence of multispecies survival amid capitalist exploitation. Each of these strategies points to systemic shifts, reminding us of the power of each breath and of how the ethical principles of justice can be advanced amid life as well as on the path to extinction.

Below are a few selections and some additional information from the museum.

Xin Liu, “The Mothership”

About the work above-

Identifying as both a scientist and an artist, Xin Liu uses the language of technological development to explore our desire to preserve and artificially extend biological life. In 2023, inspired by scientific innovations in cryonics and egg freezing, Liu developed Cry:0, a series of mixed-media sculptures that includes The Mothership, a science fiction-like panel equipped with a cooling mechanism that pulls water directly from the air, causing thin layers of frost to gradually develop on the surface of the central bronze mouth, which the artist cast from her own body. With its spectral, biomorphic form and evocative title, The Mothership reflects on technologies designed to manipulate time as well as the central role played by the female body in perpetuating the human species.

Installations by Korean art collective ikkibawiKrrr and Garnett Puett (structure in the back on the right)

About the ikkibawiKrrr multimedia installation and video-

The Korean collective ikkibawiKrr’s expanded approach to art making encompasses performance, workshops, and events. The neologism ikkibawiKrrr consists of the Korean words ikki, meaning “moss”; bawl, meaning “rock”; and krrr, an onomato poetic word that implies a rolling motion. Through its work the group aspires to be “moss-like,” an organism constantly adapting in response to its surroundings. It has focused its recent work on the culture and ecology of the tropical Jeju Island, located off the southern coast of Korea.

A popular tourist destination known for its pristine ecosystem, Jeju Island is home to a community of haenyeo (female divers, or “women of the sea’), who are venerated for their ability to hold their breath for long periods of time while underwater. Upon rising to the surface, the haenyeo make a distinctive whistling sound as they rapidly exhale carbon dioxide and inhale fresh oxygen, a breathing technique called sumbisori, or “breath sound.” A matriarchal community committed to environmentalism, the haenyeo have been sustainably harvesting seafood for centuries. Given their symbiotic relationship with nature, their already arduous work has been greatly impacted by climate change, particularly rising water temperatures, which have harmed algae and changed the migratory patterns of predatory fish. Additionally, Jeju Island is not as clean as it once was, and the haenyeo now risk being trapped by discarded fishing nets and spend their time collecting plastics from the ocean.

In the video that forms part of ikkibawiKrr’s multimedia installation Seaweed Story (2022), a haenyeo choir stands on the cliffs of Hado, a fishing village on Jeju Island, singing a regional variation on “Arrang,” an ancient folk song with strong ties to Korean nationalism. During Japan’s imperialist era (1910-45), the fishing industry exploited the haenyeo and overfished their waters, leading the women to organize local cooperatives and public demonstrations, many of which took place in Hado. Through their performance, the haenyeo reinforce their connection to both the ocean and historical resistance movements. The installation also includes a sandbox containing miniature replicas of the small houses where these women convene, rest, and change in and out of their wetsuits.

Below is Garnett Puett’s sculpture, located inside the enclosed structure pictured above, where bees help create the work.

From the museum-

A sculptor and fourth-generation beekeeper based in Hawaii, Garnett Puett collaborates with bees to create what he terms “apisculptures” (api is the Latin word for “bee”). Combining ancestral knowledge with his passion for art, Puett conceived of this signature method in 1983, when he was a graduate student at Pratt Institute in New York City. As demonstrated by the newly commissioned work on view, Puett emphasizes the creative process over any particular outcome. To initiate Untitled (Paradoxical Garden Downstream) (2024), he conceived a figurative armature for the sculpture, coated it in thick layers of beeswax using a rotating table of his own design, and enclosed it in a habitat for bees. He then introduced a locally sourced queen along with her hive, thousands of worker bees (female honeybees), who made the work their home. Over the course of its brief lifespan, approximately six weeks, the colony will gather nectar and pollen to sustain the queen while elaborating the structure with honeycomb. Working symbiotically, Puett and the bees will eventually arrive at a final apisculpture. Three previously realized works are on view in the same gallery.

Garnett Puett, “Untitled (Paradoxical Garden Downstream)”,2024

Roxy Paine, “Chart”, 2024

Roxy Paine, “Chart”, 2024 (detail)

From the museum about Roxy Paine and the work above-

Since the 1990s, Roxy Paine has made thousands of scientifically accurate reproductions of mushrooms, underscoring the important role played by fungi in balancing our ecosystems. As agents of decomposition, fungi drive the global carbon cycle-the process by which carbon moves between the soil, living organisms, and the atmosphere. Belonging to a category of artworks that Paine calls “replicants,” his synthetic fungi colonies convincing y mimic the ways organic mushrooms spread in concentrated areas, sprouting directly from the floor or from wall-hung supports. Paine has researched and replicated the three major types of mushrooms: parasitic fungi, which attack living matter, thus regulating the populations of their hosts; saprophytic fungi, which consume and recycle dead matter; and symbiotic or mycorrhizal fungi, which flourish synergistically with the roots of plants and trees, supporting forests as they absorb carbon. Also known as “climate change warriors,” mycorrhizal fungi have the capacity to delay the effects of global warming, but rising temperatures could be putting them at risk of decline.

Chart (2024), a multivariant field, presents lesser-known examples of parasitic, saprophytic, and symbiotic fungi, including Geastrum striatum, or earthstars; the coral-like Clathrus ruber, or cage fungus, a type of stinkhorn that attracts insects by smelling of rotten meat; the scaly, globular Scleroderma citrinum, or pigskin poison puffball; Sarcoscypha coccinea, or scarlet cup, composed of small, open ellipsoids, reminiscent of bodily orifices, that gather in moist moss or on the forest floor; and Lycogola epidendrum, creamsicle-colored pustules that, when naturally occurring, ooze pink slime when pressed. Paine also simulates the neon-bright nets of plasmodium slime mold, a saprophytic organism resembling fungi that consumes mushrooms, bacteria, and other rotting matter. While these species would not be found cohabitating in the wild, they unite in their effort to erode a Turkish rug patterned with abstract representations of flora and fauna. This syncretic rug, a product of merging cultures, stands in for the invisible, carpet-like mycelium, the network of threads that form the rootlike structure of a fungus.

Paintings from Mel Chin’s series of paintings for “Interpretation of Vision (or IOV, pronounced “eye of”)”

About Mel Chin’s work from the museum-

Commissioned for this exhibition, Interpretation of Vision (or IOV, pronounced “eye of”) consists of thirty-two paintings realized through personal connections with individuals whose lives were altered by phenomenological experiences. Chin believes that the first step in the collective undertaking to fight persistent social and climate injustice is to dismantle division and promote empathy toward others. Opposed to proselytizing, he feels obligated to take the first step.

Like the artist Frida Kahlo, Chin drew inspiration from retablos and ex votos, small-scale devotional paintings, typically on wood or metal, that serve as votive offerings. During the nineteenth century any life-changing event could warrant the making of an ex-voto as an offering of gratitude. Typically produced by anonymous artisans on behalf of a patron, these paintings represent the tragic circumstances, such as accidents and near-fatal Illnesses, that precipitated their commission, showing saints or martyrs intervening to save the life of the afflicted. IOV is a multistage commission that began with a public call for stories from people whose lives were altered by natural, spiritual, or supernatural phenomena. Inspired by the unnamed ex-voto artisans, Chin collaborated with each respondent to honor and elevate their stories. Each dialogue resulted in a diptych, a two-part painting, presented on an artist-designed, seismically sensitive plinth. In each work the rendering of reality is embedded into an aperture on the right, while its corollary, the depiction of the transformational experience, is mounted on the surface. The wall fluidly accommodates any shifts between perception and knowing.

Ron Finley created the large scale garden installation, Grounded for the exhibition, pictured below. Also included in his section of the exhibition are several of the shovels created by his artist friends for Urban Weaponry Project, Weapons of Mass Creation, located in a separate room.

From the museum-

Finley, also known as the Gangsta Gardener, empowers people to grow their own food and advocates for communities to have access to fresh, nutrient-dense, organically grown food. Through the Ron Finley Project, he has cultivated gardens in urban food deserts, places where access to healthy food and fresh produce is limited or nonexistent. In 2009 he began planting vegetables, fruit trees, and other greenery along parkways, the stretches of land between the sidewalk and the street, in South Central Los Angeles. “I wanted butterflies and hummingbirds. I wanted something pretty, like amaryllis and agapanthus, and I wanted it to smell like jasmine, juniper, mint, and orange blossoms,” he recalls. “So that’s what I did.” After receiving a citation from the city for gardening without a permit, he fought back, and the City of Los Angeles changed its ordinance regulating gardening on public land.

With the commissioned work Grounded, Finley brings his urban gardening practice to the Hammer, creating a green, nourishing respite on the museum’s terrace in emulation of his own extraordinary garden. Both sites include vegetables and fruit trees growing alongside artworks and repurposed objects and contain communal spaces intended to rejuvenate audiences while fostering dialogues about food access, empowerment, and freedom. Inside, Finley presents selected works from his ongoing Urban Weaponry Project, Weapons of Mass Creation (2018-), a project that underscores his deep-rooted devotion to art, design, gardening, and grassroots organizing. Seven years ago he noticed that many of his artist friends were working in isolation. In an effort to connect them, he began inviting each one to transform a common, mass-produced gardening shovel into a distinctive work of art. A testament to Finley’s strength in community building, the present installation represents only a small fraction of his expansive collection. “A tool of mass creation,” as he frequently calls it, the shovel becomes a twin symbol of artistic production and food cultivation.

Lan Tuazon also created a large installation outside of the main galleries (pictured below).

From the museum-

Part of a generation of artists invested in criticizing institutionalized systems, Lan Tuazon proposes methods for recirculating organic and human-made materials to sustainably extend the lifespan of our things. In a linear economy, most consumer products begin as natural resources extracted from the landscape only to conclude as waste in a landfill. Commissioned for this exhibition, Over Your Head & Under the Weather (2024) stages a circular economy by demonstrating techniques of material recovery. Single-use plastics have been industrially shredded and pressed into panels, surplus newspapers are densified into newspaper wood, and other organic materials like coconut fibers are reconfigured into papercrete. Tuazon also makes use of innovative industrial products. The entire structure is constructed from multifunctional WaterBricks, interlocking, modular storage containers originally designed to preserve food and water for emergency and disaster relief purposes, and the floor is lined with Biomason’s carbon-reducing/sequestering Biolith tiles, made with recycled aggregates and bacterium-cultivated cement.

Designed to resemble a functionalized minimal sculpture, Over Your Head & Under the Weather wraps around the building to form two primary architectural bays. One side houses an industrial shredder and a plastic-collection station. Visitors are invited to contribute to the work’s circular economy by donating their #2 and #5 plastics, which will later be processed and shredded. The windows on the other side of the structure contain sculptural reliefs from Tuazon’s Assorted Drive series. Drawing on the language of data storage, the Assorted Drives ironically preserve physical evidence of human production and consumption: found materials, plastic beverage rings, bread ties, caps, and confetti made from previously shredded plastics. Part of an ongoing series, the towering sculpture Future Fossil-made from mass-produced containers, cut and nested like Russian dolls-uses the metaphor of geological petrification to allude to the tremendous scale and indeterminate lifespan of consumer and industrial waste.

Tiffany Chung’s stored in a jar: moonsoon, drowning fish, color of water, and the floating world, 2010-11, pictured below, references Vietnam and its vulnerability to flooding and the rising sea level.

Through meticulous archival and mapping practices, Tiffany Chung commemorates the experiences of local communities facing sociopolitical and climate-related trauma, placing those experiences within a global context. Born in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, Chung was forced to relocate following the fall of Saigon in 1975 to one of the government’s New Economic Zones (NEZ) as part of a population redistribution program aimed at restructuring Vietnam’s economy and southern society. Chung moved with her family to the Mekong Delta, the southwestern region of Vietnam where the Mekong River meets the South China Sea. In 1978 she witnessed a historic riverine flood in the area that killed seventy-four, left seventy-nine thousand homeless, and impacted more than four hundred thousand people. Eventually Chung migrated to the United States, taking part in the massive exodus of refugees precipitated by the NEZ program. Today Vietnam is among the countries that are most vulnerable to sea-level rise. According to recent projections, by the year 2050 almost all the land in southern Vietnam could be engulfed, displacing twenty million people, or nearly one quarter of the country’s population.

In several works, Chung explores extreme flooding — a natural phenomenon that in Vietnam is exacerbated both by the construction of hydroelectric dams in the Mekong River Basin and by human-driven climate change-and proposes solutions. In 2010 she constructed stored in a jar: monsoon, drowning fish, color water, and the floating world, a large-scale model for a floating village. To create this utopian world, Chung drew a formal language from vernacular architecture throughout Asia and structured a city in emulation of actual floating communities: vessels and houseboats tethered together in Ha Long Bay in Vietnam; floating communities on Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia; a makeshift system of interconnected house-rafts on the Song Kalia River in Sangkhlaburi, Thailand; and camps of floating palaces on a network of rivers in Srinagar, India.

Tiffany Chung, “stored in a jar: moonsoon, drowning fish, color of water, and the floating world”, 2010-11

Sarah Rosalena, “Exit Point”, 2019

About Sarah Rosalena’s work pictured above-

To make Exit Point, Rosalena trained a neural network to combine the Blue Marble photo and the M87 black hole image and output the results to a mechanical loom, which materialized each pixel as a thread in a Jacquard textile. As the Jacquard loom is considered a predecessor to the modern computer, her textiles also challenge linear accounts of technological progress. Through the use of artificial intelligence, Rosalena creates coiling, looping, and spiraling temporalities that function as tools for examining our past and present.

About Bently Spang‘s War Shirt #6- Waterways, pictured above-

The Northern Cheyenne artist Bently Spang creates multidisciplinary artworks inspired by the utilitarian and artistic practices of his ancestors, the Tsitsistas/Suhtaio people. One of Spang’s first such projects was War Shirt #1 (1998), which he made by stitching together family photographs and film negatives, using the negatives as fringe. Spang notes that ancestral war shirts are “reciprocal garments” created by the community to shelter warriors as they battle to protect that community. In 2017 Mountain Time Arts in Bozeman, Montana, commissioned Spang to create a work that would explore the influence of climate change on water resources and raise awareness of the issue in the region. The result was War Shirt #6-Waterways (2017), a multimedia sculptural installation that takes the form of a Plains-style war shirt.

The body of War Shirt #6-Waterways is made up of twenty-one monitors and fringed with six digital still photographs. With the help of a local support team, Spang welded the steel armature and programmed the monitors to present a synchronous, multichannel video, which he filmed while walking from the Tongue River, a tributary of the Yellowstone River that traverses Montana and Wyoming, to a local spring on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation; the digital fringe presents images from a preserved plant press book collected by a tribal historian and ethnobotanist. “I’m telling the viewer to know your water, know where it comes from and how it gets to you, and then you can protect it,” says Spang. “We should all have a relationship with that water, with these places that the water manifests.”

Sandy Rodriguez, “YOU ARE HERE/ Tovaangar / El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula / Los Angeles”(2021)

About the Sandy Rodriguez work above-

Made during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the multilingual map of the greater Los Angeles area YOU ARE HERE / Tovaangar / El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula / Los Angeles (2021) draws inspiration from the region’s history. It includes depictions of the trial of Toypurina, an Indigenous woman who led a rebellion against the Mission San Gabriel in 1785, as well as sixteenth-century primary source materials, including the Florentine Codex (ca. 1529-69), an encyclopedic ethnographic study of central Mexico. YOU ARE HERE includes images of plants and animals used by Native peoples, which represent geographic locations and serve as indicators of the cardinal directions. Place-names are hand painted in English, Spanish, and Tongva to reference renaming in the region over time as a colonial act of aggression. Rodriguez wants visitors to encounter this painting as they might a way-finding map and to use it to reorient themselves in space and time. She studies, documents, and processes native botanical specimens that have healing properties to create pigments, inks, and watercolors, applying these handmade materials to amate paper made from the bark of trees in Puebla, Mexico. A symbol of Indigenous culture, this sacred pre-Columbian material was prohibited by the Spanish during the colonial period.

Pictured below is one of Yangkura’s “waste monsters”, Tongsinsa, and his film depicting the monster in public (him in the costume).

From the museum-

Working on the west coast of South Korea, Yangkura is a performance and installation artist who uses ordinary trash to represent the dynamics of foreign relations in northeast Asia. Provoked by the 2007 MT Hebei Spirit Oil Spill (HSOS), in which 10,900 tons of crude oil spilled into the sea and contaminated the Korean coastline, Yangkura has focused his practice on the effects of anthropogenic marine pollution. In 2013 he began collecting and categorizing the waste from North Korea, China, and Japan that washed ashore on the coast of South Korea. By tracing tidal movements, he established the migratory pattens for marine debris moving among these countries, discovering that Korea’s trash frequently makes its way to Tsushima Island in Japan. He suspects that this island’s unique geographic formation makes it behave like a vacuum for international garbage, allowing the waters east of Korea to stay relatively clean. As Yangkura’s research suggests, the litter collecting in our oceans does not recognize geopolitical boundaries.

In 2015 Yangkura began constructing “waste monsters” —whimsical, colossal trash costumes, each with its own fictive identity. Yangkura wears these costumes while stilt-walking in performances intended to draw public awareness to the grotesqueness of our collective marine pollution problem. While he recognizes other environmental activists attempting to shock the public into change, he does not believe this approach is sustainable. Instead, he prefers to broach the topic of anthropogenic pollution through storytelling, weaving fantastic, subliminal narratives to engage and educate. In 2017 Yangkura began working with Tsushima CAPPA, a Japanese environmental organization focused on promoting awareness of marine pollution and on cleaning Tsushima Island. He used this collaboration to create a new “monster,” a character he hoped would deftly underscore selfishness as a fundamental human problem. Forgotten Tongsinsa or Forgotten Messenger (2017-) is constructed from trash originating in Korea, China, and Japan recovered from the coast of Tsushima Island (the word tongsinsa refers to a messenger with a diplomatic purpose, and it was originally applied to envoys sent to Japan on goodwill missions during the Joseon era). Yangkura describes Forgotten Tongsinsa as a good monster who dearly misses home and is simply trying to find his way back again.