Madonna, Fever (music video, stills), 1993. Watch here.
Benjamin Harjo, Jr., Honoring the Spirit of All Things, 2001, opaque watercolor, 39 3/4 in. x 27 inches. On loan from Oklahoma State University Museum of Art, Stillwater, Oklahoma. Image courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville.
More here.
Liz Toohey-Wiese, 2024.
"A sign installed in the largest wildfire burn I’ve ever seen, along the BC/YK border. Borrowing the aesthetics of BC Recreation Site signs, once again pointing to the overlaps of outdoor recreation, resource extraction, and the consequences of the climate crisis. Most recreation sites in BC exist along previously built logging and mining roads.
“Forced into a great and difficult transformation” was a line I heard in a lecture on Buddhist philosophy I was listening to on my drive up north. But it became another mantra I thought about while living in a place that’s been utterly transformed by resource extraction over the past century, and as I thought about the burnt landscapes I drove through."
More here.
Martin Wong
1946 - 1999
Untitled
oil on canvas
22⅛ by 34⅛ in. (56.3 by 86.7 cm.)
Executed circa 1975-1976.
More here.
Raphaël Matieu, CUIRS ET PEAUX (leather, staples, printing, 120 x 70cm), 2023.
Guillermo Galindo, Siguiendo Los Pasos del Niño Perdido / Following the Steps of the Lost Child (Acrylic on beacon flags used by humanitarian aid group Water Stations, 29.5 x 47 in.), 2017.
Guillermo Galindo, Espejismo, (Acrylic on beacon flags used by humanitarian aid group Water Stations, 29.5 x 47 in.), 2018.
Galindo’s Flag works are printed directly onto a group of faded, weathered flags found at the border. Provided to the project by the humanitarian citizen organization Water Stations, these discarded flags were once used to indicate the presence of water tanks placed in the Calexico desert. The surface of each image is traversed by one of Galindo’s signature musical scores, printed in a variety of unique systems of notation that recall the graphic scores of John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Each work vibrates at its own distinctive visual frequency: some are crisply printed with straightforward, rebus-like instructions for a performance; in others, abstractions of line and color approach the playful improvisations of a Joan Miro painting.
Galindo’s practice often incorporates playable instruments he has fabricated from objects found at the border. Here, too, he uses the rhythms and patterns of music — as filtered through various inventive modes of visual representation – to elegantly summon a living history from that which has been discarded and forgotten.
– Nick Stone
Rebecca Belmore, Tower (2018). Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON
Tower, a pillar of shopping carts stacked high around a clay column, looms over another piece,tarpaulin, a grimy blanket-sized swatch draped over a ghostly human form. There’s an implicit nod, I think, to the naive purity of high Modernism – you can’t look at a stack of repeating forms (nor make one) without thinking of Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column. But Belmore fastens it to the cold, hard ground: Shopping carts, she told me, are essential tools for the homeless, whose population has exploded amid skyrocketing housing costs during her time in Vancouver; and tarps are maybe their most important means of survival.
Murray White, Facing the Monumental, Galleries West, August 2018
Photo credit: Art Gallery of Ontario
Ho Rui An, The Economy Enters the People, 2021–22 (installation view, Bangkok CityCity Gallery, 2022). Photo: Ketsiree Wongwan. Courtesy Bangkok CityCity Gallery. Read more here.