James Casebere constructs handmade models in his studio as the subjects of his photographs. Created in 1985, this work references the monumental formations of Utah’s Arches National Park, translating a vast natural landscape into a carefully crafted miniature diorama. The photograph also evokes Plato’s Cave, the ancient thought experiment about perception and reality. Just as Plato’s prisoners mistake shadows for a truthful depiction of reality, viewers initially read Casebere’s image as a depiction of a grand natural monument, only to discover that the seemingly expansive landscape is, in fact, a meticulously constructed model.

Joseph Kosuth’s ‘The Question (G.S.)’, contemplates the fundamental concerns that underlie both art and life. The artist’s use of an analog clock referentially anchors the concept of time to its most literal representation; however, by scaling the clock to an unusually large size, an element of the surreal is introduced. The quote on the clock by Gertrude Stein, an American novelist, poet, and playwright, reflects on time, fate, and predestination: "If you can do it, why do it?" Stein believed that art and writing should push boundaries rather than repeat what is already known. If a task is easily achievable, there is no real artistic purpose in executing it.

Diana Fonseca Quiñones’ Caminando bajo el sol, which translates to “Walking under the sun,” films the artist’s fingers traversing the skyline of the city of Havana, Cuba. Dwarfing the city under her hand, the artist plays with perception and scale, fiction and reality.

Katharina Fritsch subverts prototypical imagery through color, scale, and material. The result destabilizes the perceptive reflex, prompting a search for deeper psychological exploration by the viewer. St. Nicolas, though suggesting a monument, is rendered in a cartoonish, tyrian purple in a domestic size atypical for the devotional idol it depicts. 

EUGLOSSA depicts an orchid bee (Euglossini) native to the Amazon, known for its millennial-long symbiotic relationship with a single species of orchid. The male orchid bee pollinates the flower in exchange for the orchid’s perfume. Ana González’s sculpture reflects on the monumental impact the diminutive creature has on the grandiose Amazonian ecosystem. 

Gilded in recycled gold, EUGLOSSA interrogates the devastating nature of the gold mining industry on the environment, creating an object that addresses both the preservation and destruction of a unique and fragile ecosystem.

This sculpture by Zac Landon-Pole combines the delicate, shell-like casing of a female cephalopod with a meteorite that traversed the galaxy fitted into the aperture of the shell. In the words of the artist, “I’ve been thinking about things from the depth of the sea and then the depth of space—this in-between space between borders and between national territories,” he explains. “Collapsing those two dimensions together into these strange hybrid or synthesized objects was already a lens through which I was thinking about space.” The work meditates on vast scales of distance and duration, linking the immeasurable depths of the ocean to the expanses of the cosmos. Questions of geological time and systems of measurement converge within the sculpture’s improbable union of the organic shell and the extraterrestrial stone. 

Julian Charrière’s artwork, A Thousand Worlds, is made using a classical mirroring technique. A layer of silver is deposited on the rear of a sheet of glass to form a highly reflective surface. The silver used for this artwork has been recovered from thousands of discarded silver-gelatin photographs. Charrière uses this reclaimed silver to reveal a hidden economy of image-making, and by extension, a reflection on the global exploitation of resources in which vast amounts of minerals, metals, and organic materials are continually extracted, destroyed, and remade to serve human needs.

Sun Xun is widely known for transforming traditional Chinese ink painting and printmaking techniques into striking, moving images. The Time Vivarium — Silk Book 1 is an intricate leporello, a folding book featuring acrylic and ink painting on silk that relates to a larger stop-motion animated film. The book and film, based upon his father’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution, reflect upon official histories, state propaganda, and museum dioramas.

Using specialized software, Idris Khan scanned a reproduction of Leonard DaVinci’s masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, to reveal the amount of each color employed in the painting. He then created new individual panels based upon the percentage of each color employed in the original masterpiece.

Column (On a Windless Day), 2009 is a preparatory drawing by British-American artist Anthony McCall. It belongs to a series of studies for his ambitious, large-scale public art proposal, Projected Column, which was originally commissioned by Arts Council England for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. The work was intended to be a monumental spiral of spinning steam rising 6 miles into the sky and visible for up to 60 miles on a clear day. Unfortunately, the proposed installation was beset by complex regulatory hurdles and was eventually abandoned due to concerns from the Civil Aviation Authority that it would interfere with aircraft. 

Known for his hyper-realistic sculptures of everyday objects, Iran do Espírito Santo’s Bulb is a celebrated part of the artist’s oeuvre. In this work, a commonplace household object becomes the subject of rigorous transformation. By rendering a light bulb in solid stainless steel, made to scale, he produces an object that appears more perfect than its real-world counterpart,that does not emit light, but reflects it. In doing so, the bulb is no longer a utilitarian device, but an archetype to be observed, studied, and contemplated. 

Created a few years after burning the entirety of his early painting oeuvre, John Baldessari’s collage, This Cloud That Fire, investigates the relationship between text and image. As the artist stated, “Word and image are of equal value to me in my mind.” The collage foregrounds this concept by placing equal weight on both the small scale photographs and handwritten lettering, placed compositionally on a large sheet of negative space.