AN HARANGUE
Tony Cokes, Brandon Lattu, Jesse Stecklow
May 31 - June 28, 2025
Car doors have been designed to close loudly because it’s been shown to make consumers feel safer. A chemical agent is added to soap to produce bubbles because of the strong association between bubbles and cleanliness. The blue light emitted from TV’s suppresses melatonin production making the viewer feel more alert. There’s an established correlation between color temperature and productivity levels. Slow music makes restaurant-goers drink more alcohol and fast music makes them leave more quickly, usually customers drinking more alcohol leads to more profit but it depends. It has been shown the color yellow has strong associations with happiness.
Slavoj Zizek has an anecdote about how it’s the mole to the left of Marilyn Monroe’s mouth that is the source of her exceptional beauty. While his point is about true beauty needing imperfections I think it also speaks to the profound effect of that which exists on the periphery.
WORKS LIST
National Broadcasting Company
LED television tuned to local NBC broadcast, plastic
2025
Brandon Lattu
From Pipe to Light
Avon wild country aftershave corn cob pipe bottles, glass, electronics, led lights, paper, mdf
2024
Jesse Stecklow
Ear Wiggler (Metronome Light)
Paper, MDF, hardware, warm and cool corncob light bulbs, glass, sockets, enclosure, timer, chrome-painted straw
2021
Jesse Stecklow
Evil.12.edit.b (fear, spectra & fake emotions)
HD video, color, sound. 11:43 minutes
2009
Tony Cokes
ARTIST BIOS
TONY COKES
Tony Cokes makes politically resonant works in a visual language all his own. Since the 1980s, his work has surfaced the latent ideologies of popular culture, confronting issues of structural racism, power, visibility, and the defiant pleasures still found under capitalism. Cokes samples and remixes fragments of our media landscape to subvert its governing codes.His tightly choreographed video essays layer found text over vibrant colors and dissonant soundtracks, exploiting the gaps between sensory regimes to heighten and complicate the reading experience. Quoted passages from current events or critical theory take on a new tenor when set to music, resulting in propulsive animations that appeal to the mind and body alike. Cokes’s immersive works make text feel visceral and let rhythm spur new insight: as his art attests, “it is possible to dance and think at the same time.”
Tony Cokes lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he serves as Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Cokes was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2024 and the Rome Prize in 2022–23. He was
the subject of a major survey jointly organized by the Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein in Munich in 2022. Other recent solo exhibitions include Batalha Centro de Cinema, Porto (2024–25); Dia Bridgehampton, The Dan Flavin Art Institute, Bridgehampton, New York (2023–24); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2024); De Balie, Amsterdam (2022); Greene Naftali, New York (2022, 2018); Memorial Art Gallery, Univer- sity of Rochester, Rochester (2021); MACRO Contemporary Art Museum, Rome (2021); CIRCA, London (2021); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona (2020); ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels (2020); Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2020); BAK – basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands (2020); Luma Westbau, Zurich (2019); Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London (2019); The Shed, New York (2019); Kunsthall Bergen, Norway (2018); and REDCAT, Los Angeles (2012).
His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Providence; Dia Art Foundation, New York; FRAC Lorraine, Metz; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; KADIST, San Francisco; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chica- go; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
BRANDON LATTU
Brandon Lattu (b. 1970) is an artist whose work utilizes photography, sculpture, and video to investigate the constantly changing state of representation in order to push beyond the conventional empiricism that pictures of the world have traditionally invoked. His work particularly addresses the social structures emphasized and enforced by models of perspective and abstraction as well as spatial hierarchies in commerce, architecture and digital space.
A mid-career survey exhibition curated by Charlotte Cotton, Empirical, Textual, Contextual, was held at the California Museum of Photography in 2022. Solo exhibitions include Full to Bursting, Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles (2019)Not Human, Koenig and Clinton, New York (2013); Reciprocity of Light, Mak Center for Art and Architecture, Los Ange- les (2010); 3 Models, Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver (2007) and Vacio 9, Madrid; and
4 Models, Leo Koenig Inc., New York (2007). Jenseits des Physisch Möglichen, an early survey exhibition curated by Dr. Stefanie Heraeus was held at the Kunstverein in Biele- feld, Germany in 2007, accompanied by Office Gray Case, an artist’s book reworking the traditional monograph.
Lattu has participated in numerous international group exhibitions at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Powerstation of Art, Shanghai; Fundación Jumex, Ecatapec; Museum Ostwall, Dortmund; Mak Center, Los Angeles; the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam; Vox Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal; the Essl Collection, Vienna; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Kunsthalle Basel. Notable public collections include the Albertina, Vienna; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Fondación Jumex, Mexico; the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; and the California Museum of Photography, Riverside among others. The Centre Pompidou has collected several works and retains an archive of the artist’s posters and ephemeral materials.
Brandon Lattu lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1998 and his BFA from the Corcoran School of Art in Washing- ton, DC in 1994. In 1993 he participated in the Yale Summer School of Music and Art at Norfolk, Connecticut. Since 2008 he has taught in the Art Department at the University of California, Riverside.
JESSE STECKLOW
Jesse Stecklow (b.1993) is an artist and graphic designer based in Los Angeles. He uses objects, images, text and sound to create site-responsive installations. Oftentimes, his works collect from their environments. Exhibited on an ongoing basis, they pull from their surroundings to inform the creation of new works. This might manifest as forms that model themselves after the perimeter of a room or as objects that sample airborne mate- rials for future use. Along with this responsive approach, he employs logics of free asso- ciation, linguistic play and repetition to explore how meaning is generated. By altering and re-exhibiting works, he engages the passage of time and discards notions of where an artwork begins and ends. Similarly, he uses the boundaryless qualities of light and sound to prioritize immediacy and erase divisions between singular works, their support structures and the larger environment.
Recent projects include Timekeepers at Dracula's Revenge, New York, Floor to Ceiling at Sweetwater, Berlin, Terminal at Mumok, Vienna, and Components in the Air at The Bain- bridge House, Princeton University Art Museum. Recent group exhibitions include Air De Repos at CAPC, Bordeaux, After Images at Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin, and The Living House, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig. Stecklow was awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant in 2017. His work is in the collections of the Mumok, Vienna, the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin, among others.
A note on my recent sculptures illuminated by televisual signals:
by Brandon Lattu
National Broadcasting Company is illuminated by the television signal broadcast on NBC. For this exhibition in Los Angeles the signal is from the broadcast antenna on Mt. Wilson radiating at 602.0 MHz on the ultra-high frequency (UHF) channel 36 that is mapped for tuning on virtual channel 4.
Over the last several years, when I have time away from art or work, I have traveled to the Washington, DC area to visit my elderly parents. Both deal with several of the usual maladies of age that in experience are anything but usual. This time spent with them is slower than my normal life with much time spent driving them to doctor’s appointments or church or cooking meals.
As I cook dinner they watch the evening news in the background, out of sight but not earshot. First local channel 4 NBC news and then BBC world news. Of course, like most people under 70, I get my news custom on my phone, so I was somewhat struck by the realization that they still assemble for the evening broadcast. The narrow hallway be- tween the kitchen and living room traps the light but not the sound, stories delivered by talking heads and figureheads about tragedy and fraud. Lately, the stories increasingly describe the heedless dismantling of bureaus like and including ones that my parents worked for in their careers as civil servants.
When I was a kid, my family had tube televisions much of the time, at first small black and white models and later medium-size color sets. I rarely remember watching televi- sion with my family together and the set would often be off unless tuned to a scheduled program. It seemed television was a solitary and alienating experience — a kind of virtual individuated entertainment. But now, peering in to ask about finding things in their kitch- en, I observed the modulating broadcast light projected onto their faces together and it made me think about the millions who, like them, receive this nightly audiovisual delivery simultaneously across the country. It made me think about the transmission from signal to wavelengths of light divided spatially into domestic units but experienced collectively in a more physical sense, the immaterial made a bit more material by scheduled and si- multaneous albeit separate reception. I saw this in contrast to my own reception of news received constantly through my cellphone, algorithmically tailored to activate my individ- ual anxieties in a semi-navigable endless scroll increasingly separate from others.
I think in some ways National Broadcasting Company is an effort to coax into physical form that shared reception of TV, to make a material of the abstraction of a commercial medium, and to push this earlier model of virtuality into the physical space of sculpture that we can share.
Exhibition curated by Antonio Bever