Bruce Conner was an American conceptual artist and member of the San Francisco Beat movement. His diverse range of films, collages, and sculptural assemblages are defined by the artist’s fascination with the grotesque and mortality. Conner’s inspiration often came from Surrealist artwork and Victorian-era aesthetics, resulting in a unique juxtaposition of form and content, fact and fiction. One of his most famous works, Child (1959), functions as an homage to the executed inmate Caryl Chessman, and takes the form of a haunting skeletal figure rotting in a chair. “My work is described as beautiful, horrible, hogwash, genius, maundering, precise, quaint, avant-garde, historical, hackneyed, masterful, trivial,” the artist...