Financial intrigue and debacle, government-sponsored spying, preemptive war, and more: an endless stream of news underscores the manipulation of power and resources with consequences for us all. The news headlines that have intrigued and horrified us of late have become, not surprisingly, inspiration for many contemporary artists worldwide. Whether exposing the complexity or folly of conspiracy theory, or analyzing money trails and their surprising beneficiaries, all of the artists featured are essentially questioning control. Who controls whom? Who controls what? Where does it leave the...

The Strange Life of Objects provides the first critical overview of Annette Lemieux's dynamic and varied career. She first garnered attention on the newly global art scene of the 1980s. Since that time she has continued to produce work that grows in depth and resonance, proving herself an artist of lasting significance.

Lemieux's early use of traditional techniques - painting, printing, casting, and photography - expanded to include found materials laden with cultural meanings and evocative of personal memories. Whatever the material, Lemieux masters and invents techniques and...

Modernist design, that radical and iconoclastic break with the past, is now itself a thing of the past. Perhaps sufficiently so that over the last few years, artists have been treating modernist designs as icons themselves, and incorporating them?sometimes literally and often conceptually?into their own work. These recombinations and modifications result in an entirely unique mix: a meta-modernism in which the original source is changed, self-referential, abstracted. Using classic elements in new configurations, artists from across the world are making original works of art that comment on...

During their decade-long collaboration (1985-1995), Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler produced some of the most influential conceptual art projects of the time. Among their witty and stimulating installations and outdoor projects was "Camouflaged History," a house painted in a U.S. Army-designed camouflage pattern using 72 commercial paint colors included in the...