Glenn Kaino, Colonial Division Stage 2, The Troubles Within, 2019, gold plated model parts, sea urchin, diamond petroleum quartz, amethyst, amber, insect pins, cotton, paint and high-density urethane, 40" × 70" × 4-1/2" (101.6 cm × 177.8 cm × 11.4 cm) © Glenn Kaino Online Glenn Kaino Monads Jul 6 – Aug 26, 2023 Glenn Kaino—who is known for his multidisciplinary, collaborative practice spanning painting, sculpture, installation, performance, monumental public art, theatrical production, and feature film—examines a wide range of political, social, and environmental issues in his work.This focused online presentation spotlights the artist’s pin drawings, intricate sculptural works that he creates using different combinations of gold and ruthenium plated model parts, insect pins, paint, high-density urethane, and other varied materials. A selection of works from this exhibition are on view by appointment at our 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York.The presentation, which coincides with the opening of (opens in a new window) Glenn Kaino: Aki’s Market at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, is accompanied by a new text on the Pin Drawings by curator and writer Tim Griffin. Read More Glenn Kaino, Trees (Daimonji), 2021, gold and ruthenium plated model parts, cotton, insect pins, paint and high-density urethane, 40" × 40" × 4-1/2" (101.6 cm × 101.6 cm × 11.4 cm) © Glenn Kaino Works of art are often understood implicitly to provide audiences with models of one sort or another. Some function mimetically, comprising representations—whether in painting, sculpture, or performance at any scale—of individuals and objects in the world. But any such model has a more conceptual basis as well, linked to the word’s etymological roots in the Latin term modulus: something steeped in a “standard” or “measure.” In other words, a work of art necessarily also possesses a notational or iterative character, reflecting and materializing the grounds of some baseline social and philosophical complex by which a particular experience has been ordered, shaped, and grasped. In a sense, any work of art “models” the very consciousness that created it, while mapping a dialogue with those broader cultural forces subtending this creativity in all its valences. Read More Glenn Kaino, Trees (Daimonji), 2021, gold and ruthenium plated model parts, cotton, insect pins, paint and high-density urethane, 40" × 40" × 4-1/2" (101.6 cm × 101.6 cm × 11.4 cm) Learn More Close modal View Previous View Next Carousel slide 0 Carousel slide 1 Carousel slide 2 Carousel slide 3 Carousel slide 4 Carousel slide 5 Carousel slide 6 Carousel slide 7 Glenn Kaino Trees (Daimonji) 2021 gold and ruthenium plated model parts, cotton, insect pins, paint and high-density urethane 40" × 40" × 4-1/2" (101.6 cm × 101.6 cm × 11.4 cm) Inquire How can we reach you? First Name* Last Name* Email* Phone Inquiry Message Have you purchased from Pace before?* Yes No Submit Inquiry Or go back Glenn Kaino, Sunspot (Syria + Ferguson), 2019, found asphalt, meteorite, copper, paint and high-density urethane, 40" × 40" × 4-1/2" (101.6 cm × 101.6 cm × 11.4 cm) Learn More Close modal View Previous View Next Carousel slide 0 Carousel slide 1 Carousel slide 2 Carousel slide 3 Carousel slide 4 Carousel slide 5 Carousel slide 6 Carousel slide 7 Glenn Kaino Sunspot (Syria + Ferguson) 2019 found asphalt, meteorite, copper, paint and high-density urethane 40" × 40" × 4-1/2" (101.6 cm × 101.6 cm × 11.4 cm) Inquire How can we reach you? First Name* Last Name* Email* Phone Inquiry Message Have you purchased from Pace before?* Yes No Submit Inquiry Or go back Glenn Kaino, Colonial Division Stage 2, The Troubles Within, 2019, gold plated model parts, sea urchin, diamond petroleum quartz, amethyst, amber, insect pins, cotton, paint and high-density urethane, 40" × 70" × 4-1/2" (101.6 cm × 177.8 cm × 11.4 cm) Learn More Close modal View Previous View Next Carousel slide 0 Carousel slide 1 Carousel slide 2 Carousel slide 3 Carousel slide 4 Carousel slide 5 Carousel slide 6 Carousel slide 7 Carousel slide 8 Carousel slide 9 Carousel slide 10 Carousel slide 11 Carousel slide 12 Carousel slide 13 Carousel slide 14 Glenn Kaino Colonial Division Stage 2, The Troubles Within 2019 gold plated model parts, sea urchin, diamond petroleum quartz, amethyst, amber, insect pins, cotton, paint and high-density urethane 40" × 70" × 4-1/2" (101.6 cm × 177.8 cm × 11.4 cm) Inquire How can we reach you? First Name* Last Name* Email* Phone Inquiry Message Have you purchased from Pace before?* Yes No Submit Inquiry Or go back Such a proposition underlies Glenn Kaino’s Pin Drawings, a continuing series of assemblages the artist makes using elements from hobbyist model kits for machines, from racecars to rocket ships and beyond. For these works, the artist effectively—and playfully—misuses the various components of each assembly kit, arranging them into sketches that refer to scenes both real and imagined. For instance, in The Distance of the Sun (Beams) (2018), Kaino uses disassembled gold-plated sections from models for a military tank and Tamiya-brand rifle to depict an alternate, semi-abstracted version of writer Italo Calvino’s “The Distance of the Moon”—a short story chronicling a maritime journey to the Earth’s horizon line, where voyagers venture to the lunar surface by ladder. And for Trees (Daimonji) (2021), Kaino plated a similar model in gold and ruthenium, arranging these pieces to suggest the Daimonji Festival in Kyoto, Japan, where large-scale “drawings” are forged in controlled fires within the city’s mountainous landscape.Notably, these two Pin Drawings are linked to larger-scale projects by Kaino, suggesting how works in this series function as “models” within the artist’s extended and unfolding process. Indeed, a sun-kissed mash-up in Distance doubles as a drafted plan for the artist’s commission for the Los Angeles MTA Airport Metro Connector, by which passengers will to travel to the skies. And Daimonji is directly connected to Kaino’s immersive installation A Forest for the Trees (2021), which looks to Indigenous peoples’ practices of forest stewardship in the face of the climate crisis. Read More Glenn Kaino, Colonial Division Stage 3, The Troubles Within, 2019, gold plated model parts, amber, insect pins, paint and high-density urethane, 50" × 90" × 4-1/2" (127 cm × 228.6 cm × 11.4 cm) Learn More Close modal View Previous View Next Carousel slide 0 Carousel slide 1 Carousel slide 2 Carousel slide 3 Carousel slide 4 Carousel slide 5 Carousel slide 6 Carousel slide 7 Carousel slide 8 Carousel slide 9 Carousel slide 10 Carousel slide 11 Glenn Kaino Colonial Division Stage 3, The Troubles Within 2019 gold plated model parts, amber, insect pins, paint and high-density urethane 50" × 90" × 4-1/2" (127 cm × 228.6 cm × 11.4 cm) Inquire How can we reach you? First Name* Last Name* Email* Phone Inquiry Message Have you purchased from Pace before?* Yes No Submit Inquiry Or go back Glenn Kaino, The Distance of the Sun (Beams), 2018, gold plated model parts, insect pins, paint and high-density urethane, 40" × 40" × 4-3/4" (101.6 cm × 101.6 cm × 12.1 cm) Learn More Close modal View Previous View Next Carousel slide 0 Carousel slide 1 Carousel slide 2 Carousel slide 3 Carousel slide 4 Carousel slide 5 Carousel slide 6 Carousel slide 7 Glenn Kaino The Distance of the Sun (Beams) 2018 gold plated model parts, insect pins, paint and high-density urethane 40" × 40" × 4-3/4" (101.6 cm × 101.6 cm × 12.1 cm) Inquire How can we reach you? First Name* Last Name* Email* Phone Inquiry Message Have you purchased from Pace before?* Yes No Submit Inquiry Or go back Glenn Kaino, Coordinated Anthropocene Time (ATC-19:84a), 2021, gold plated model parts, quartz, insect pins, paint and high-density urethane, 22" × 22" × 4-5/8" (55.9 cm × 55.9 cm × 11.7 cm) Learn More Close modal View Previous View Next Carousel slide 0 Carousel slide 1 Carousel slide 2 Carousel slide 3 Carousel slide 4 Carousel slide 5 Carousel slide 6 Glenn Kaino Coordinated Anthropocene Time (ATC-19:84a) 2021 gold plated model parts, quartz, insect pins, paint and high-density urethane 22" × 22" × 4-5/8" (55.9 cm × 55.9 cm × 11.7 cm) Inquire How can we reach you? First Name* Last Name* Email* Phone Inquiry Message Have you purchased from Pace before?* Yes No Submit Inquiry Or go back A deeper, more provocative notion of modeling can be uncovered by considering the social premises of Kaino’s approach for his Pin Drawings, which is rooted in the subculture of “kitbashing”: the practice of taking pieces from different model kits, which are never meant to be mixed, to make entirely new objects. This technique recalls the Situationists’ détournments from the postwar era, refashioning the parts of technocratic, industrial production to realize new desires. In other ways, it reflects the ingestion of such practices by postindustrial society. Kitbashing is most familiar to us from its references in popular television and films—for the Batmobile in the 2005 film Batman Begins or, going back more than a half century, the spacecraft in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both potential and pitfall are inextricably bound together, hand in hand.As Kaino has said, the larger cultural implications of the Pin Drawings are best located in a moment roughly contemporaneous with Kubrick’s film: the emergence during the late 1960s of new programming techniques that were no longer linear, but instead “object oriented.” In other words, different computer programs—fashioned with different aims—could be interlocked, amplifying their processing power and expanding their potential utility. This framework still guides our plug-and-play infrastructure as well as the application-based, fluid fabric of our digitally inflected experience of the world today. Read More Glenn Kaino Colonial Division Stage 3, The Troubles Within, 2019 gold plated model parts, amber, insect pins, paint and high-density urethane, 50" × 90" × 4-1/2" (127 cm × 228.6 cm × 11.4 cm) © Glenn Kaino These ideas are the foundation of Kaino’s sculptures and installations. In A Plank for Every Pirate (2006), the artist brings together two ship hulls that are held in place by 50 planks protruding in multiple directions. This work is intended as a monument for revolutionaries, from Zapatistas to Black Panthers, who strove for but did not realize their dreams of a better world. In Tank (2014), the artist unites the natural and the synthetic, fostering coral growth across a M-60 Patton tank cast in resin. For his 2022 exhibition In the Light of a Shadow at Mass MOCA, Kaino presented an array of sculptural works deeply engaged with political events in Selma, Alabama and Derry, Northern Ireland—separate tragedies that were nevertheless given the same name, “Bloody Sunday.”As a model for his practice, Kaino’s Pin Drawings series offers the subtlest yet clearest, most potent articulation of his approach to making. Inasmuch as they present a model for his work, they are monads, too. Bending back to the Greek origins of that term—and even adopting the circular cast of the atom—each of his Pin Drawings ought to be understood as a unit reflecting the material order of the world. Yet, in the spirit of the term monad as found in functional programming today, they also comprise fragments that point to something more, to the possibility of other routines. In this respect, Kaino is completely unique for finding a program for art as it traverses so many different contemporary cultural spheres, and may yet bring them together in new, liberating ways. Read More To inquire about works by Glenn Kaino, please email us at inquiries@pacegallery.com Read More About the ArtistGlenn Kaino is known internationally for his expansive vision and activist-minded practice, which encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, performance, monumental public art, theatrical production, and feature film. Examining a wide range of political, social, and environmental issues in his work, Kaino takes a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to art making. His work brings together systems of knowledge, forms of production, and people that do not normally have a chance to connect, and often involves long-term partnerships with a diverse array of visionary collaborators.Learn More Past, Glenn Kaino, Monads, Jul 6, 2023