An American Self-Portrait Series
~chris jordan, Seattle, 2008
“Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something . . . and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of [them].
This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.”
Barbie Dolls, 2008
60″ x 80″
Depicts 32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the US in 2006.
Detail at actual print size
The LAB (for installation + performance art), in association with SLAG Gallery, has been converted by Grimanesa Amorós into ”LA INCUBADORA”, which will be featuring “You Cannot Feel It…I Wish You Could” a sculpture installation arising out of her personal experiences during and immediately following her pregnancy with her daughter Shammiel. The installation explores the interplay between biology and society and particularly the concept of male pregnancy.
BTW, statistics have it that on the average, 25,000 people pass by this corner of Lexington Avenue and 47th Street each day.
Originally from South Africa, Mustafa fairly recently moved with his family from Berlin and now lives and works in Turku, Finland. His wife, Amina, is Finnish and they are well connected with music communities throughout the world. They have two lovely daughters: Leyah and Badiah. His large paintings are often portraits of multiethnic individuals and reflect his own mixed heritages. I’ve exhibited his work in New York as well. Mustafa was in the most recent Sao Paulo Biennial.
Hanging Fire, the idiom used to suggest a critical delay, is an appropriate title for the first museum show in America of contemporary art from Pakistan, a country created by partition in 1947 that constitutes the second largest Muslim population in the world. Subject to ongoing complex shearing forces that result in a tenuous daily existence, frequently marked by violence, it fosters a critical mass of outstanding creative individuals in the visual arts whose work reflects or alludes to the coping with and negotiations of that existence.
Arif Mahmood’s Young and the Fearless (2004), gelatin silver print, 16 x 16 in. is a chilling image, prescient of the issues raised in Sikandar, the current film about an adolescent Kashmiri soccer player who comes upon a gun, and emblematic of the false bravado and empowerment issues felt by young men who find themselves in the unfitting position of possessing and handling a firearm. The Karachi-based street photographer states, “I document what I see, but I also give a small part of myself to the image.”
This highly recommended show, curated by the esteemed Salim Hashmi, includes other photo-based works, as well as painting, video, and sculpture by Hamra Abbas, Bani Abidi, Zahoor ul Akhlaq, Faiza Butt, Ayaz Jokhio, Naiza Khan, Huma Mulji, Asma Mundrawala, Imran Qureshi, Rashid Rana, Ali Raza, Answar Saeed, Adeela Suleman, and Mahreen Zuberi.
In Second Skin (2009) Oil on canvas, 84″ x 60″ the Manila-based artist paints a shirtless youth wearing his t-shirt like a doo-rag, shroud, or the Veil of Veronica. The term second skin can be read as a coverup, disguise, or as scar tissue. From the Tagalog saying, “you’re like a t-shirt, always changing” Ventura gives a nod to the current commodification of tatooage by the brand Don Ed Hardy by Christian Audigier, and with the jarring juxtapositions for which he is known, the artist has drawn three cartoon mice playing baseball atop the bound head.
