Half a million cigarettes lean against each other to form a tiger skin carpet; walk around it, and see the colors change. Xu chose the cigarette brand 1st Class because it was one of the few still grown and distributed in the United States. In the uneasy images from this series, crowds of people look up at trees or poles that seem totally unremarkable. In fact, those trees once contained something horrifying: lynched Latinx, Asian, and Native American men.
These lynchings have not often been recognized in the historical record, and Ken Gonzales-Day wanted to call attention to them. Rather than reproduce the bodies of these men, however, Gonzales-Day used image editing software to remove them. The focus here, instead, is the white people who attended the lynchings, creating a public spectacle of this brutality and then circulating images of it via postcards, which the artist collected. Before becoming an artist, Jordan worked as a diver.
Longing for such symbiosis, she turned to the potato, a German transplant much like herself, welcoming it in. First, she made a video in which she appeared to grow a potato in her own butt. Then, when the Humboldt Forum reopened in Berlin in , the project got a second life.
Home to looted objects in what was once an Imperialist palace, the Forum was occupied by Friedrich II—the king who made potatoes, native to the Andes, a German staple. Miraculously, the Forum accepted. At the grand reopening, Jordan lined the entrance with 3D-printed copies of her rump—33 of them, that butt-shaped number—all with tubers growing from her anus. The most successful of them, Fag Face Mask , was generated with data solely from queer men in response to efforts to use the technology to determine sexual orientation, a goal obviously ripe for pseudoscience and stereotyping.
Other versions respond to the targeting of immigrants and other minorities. Is his mind so addled from isolation that he is imagining this? Barriers Stanchions comprises rows and rows of retractable belt barriers, arranged to form a maze. Surely, one that requires fewer of these seemingly innocuous barriers seen everywhere from national borders to airports, from DMV offices to museum admissions desks. Wellness often gets talked about as if it is a science: Which treatments are the best, and how do they work?
