In this video, Bradley Castellanos discusses his interest in landscape, which he sees as a both a reflection of his own interior landscape and of society’s values.

Combining photography, painting, and collage, Castellanos’s work explores the tense relationship between nature and civilization. Much of his recent work depicts figures in forested environments, revealing the beauty and quiet of the natural world among the persistent signs of humans’ destructive actions.

How little does an artist need in a moving image to tell a story? In this film, artist Tommy Hartung employs minimal means and materials to create animated movies, performing a series of experiments in his basement studio in Ridgewood, Queens. Hartung’s remodeled underground space functions as a workshop—or in the words of a friend, an “arena”—with colored lights, dioramas, and puppet-like characters.

In this video, Suzanne Bocanegra describes how “a tiny little Seurat painting” inspired her to create Little Dot. She envisioned the defined movements of a ballerina’s feet as a parallel to the movement of Seurat’s pulsating dots, leading her to create a piece that combines sculpture, sound, and live performance.

In this video, Nnenna Okore discusses overcoming the challenges of being a female African artist and how her passion to create leads her to inspire young female artists.

We were invited behind-the-scenes at the shoot for Yoshua Okon's latest video Octopus. The piece, shot on location at a Los Angeles Home Depot store, explores the relationships among Guatemalan day laborers who at home fought on opposite sides of the Guatemalan civil war, yet here in the U.S. are working side-by-side in their efforts to find employment. The work was produced during Okon's residency with the Hammer. He explains more about the work in this video. (Run time: 8 minutes)

Together the photos Cruise and Shop, (2011), take as their point of departure the historic NASA mobility studies through which, prior to departing for space missions, astronauts would practice on Earth in preparation for life in orbit. These photos bizarrely and amusingly reverse this scenario. Instead of showing real astronauts in simulated space situations, the photographs depict a father and son dressed as astronauts, going through the motions of mundane daily life in Indiana.

Sreshta Premnath muses on American pop culture internalized as a child in India. For "The Matter Within", he revisits the iconic image of the MGM lion after the bankruptcy of the legendary Hollywood studio.

Sreshta Premnath is part of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' exhibition "The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India".

• Video by Kai Hsing (proto-kai.com)

• Music via Free Music Archive: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ghostly_Dust_Machine/

• More about the exhibition Sreshta is part of at ybca.org/matter-within

On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century
The Museum of Modern Art, November 21, 2010-February 7, 2011

Images courtesy of the artist

© 2010 The Museum of Modern Art, New York