Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery will present two solo exhibitions from Feb 14 – Apr 14, 2019, which are Gravity by David Alekhuogie – featuring a series of newly-commissioned, multidisciplinary works that use gravity as a metaphor for human struggle – and Trouble, the first solo exhibition in LA by artist Mariah Garnett, which includes a selection of her films and installations alongside related prints.
David Alekhuogie’s exhibition Gravity includes a series of backboard paintings, produced by the artist’s repeated attempts to jump and hit the canvas with his hand. The strenuous mark-making of this gesture undercuts the precision of minimalist painting while physical striving and falling become a metaphor for the precariousness of freedom in America. Gravity also includes photographs of models wearing low-slung pants, a trope of urban hip hop culture that has been widely criminalized. Captured in diffuse light and printed on satin, these normally contentious garments become abstracted, painterly images that blur flat photograph and sculptural object while examining the visual poetics underlying the way intersecting cultures assign value to race, and gender in America.
At the heart of Mariah Garnett’s exhibition will be an installation of her new film Trouble, a feature-length experimental documentary about the artist’s burgeoning relationship with her father, whom she only met in adulthood and has been in the making for over 4 years. Garnett’s earlier work – from war veterans turned Hollywood stuntmen in Full Burn (2014) to a friendship with a gender ambivalent ten year old in Picaresques – will also feature and what unites the films is a dismantling of the power structures surrounding representation in mainstream cinema. By including her own image, Garnett positions queerness in relationship to subject matter that on the surface may seem disconnected from LGBT identity.
