The Fahey/Klein Gallery is pleased to present The Mash Up, the inaugural exhibition of collaborative works by British photographer Janette Beckman and some of New York’s most important graffiti artists.  This series combines Beckman’s iconic portraits of influential DJs and MCs, each individually painted, drawn on, and/or collaged by many of New York’s best-known graffiti artists including Crash, Futura, Lady Pink, Queen Andrea, Revolt & Zephyr.

The Mash Up series was originally conceived and curated by artist and former Def Jam Creative Director, Cey Adams.  Adams selected and curated the participating artists, with Beckman allowing each artist to select a photo from her archive to recreate in their own distinct style, producing entirely new works of art in the process.

In addition to the new collaborative Mash Up works, our exhibition features a selection of historic photography produced by Beckman during London’s seminal punk rock era, and the birth of New York City’s hip hop culture.

Janette Beckman began her career at the dawn of punk rock working for publications such as The Face and Melody Maker.  She shot bands from The Clash to Boy George as well as three Police album covers and documented the youth culture of the era.  Moving to NYC in 1983, Beckman was drawn to the underground hip-hop scene where she photographed the pioneers of the culture such as RUN DMC, Slick Rick, Salt-N-Pepa, Grandmaster Flash, and Big Daddy Kane.

In lieu of a press release we offer this poem by Pulitzer winning, eco poet Forrest Gander. "Postfire-Forest" is from his upcoming book "Twice Alive" to be published later this year.

In the early 1990s, Robert Gober began making artworks that resemble newspapers, seamlessly interspersing his own fabricated stories and images between pre-existing articles and advertisements. First shown in his 1992 exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, the sculptures of bundled newspapers are among his most iconic works.

Gober has been exploring sexuality, politics, religion, and the natural world in meticulously handcrafted work since the 1970s. In his art, even the most seemingly commonplace object contains multiple meanings and implications. The foundation of his practice is the physical act of making, which for Gober can entail learning a new craft, sourcing materials and knowledge, and enduring long periods of trial and error. While his work addresses universal themes of loss, longing, and acceptance, his personal experiences deeply inform his art, charging each work with an acute sense of intimacy.

The advertisement seen here is a direct critique of the negligent refusal of the Reagan administration to appropriately address the AIDS epidemic.

From a 1992 Washington Post article:
“AIDS health groups have ridiculed the CDC’s advertisement showing a man putting on a sock with the caption: ‘Putting on a condom is just as simple.’ They countered with an ad showing a sock and the message: ‘Ten years into the AIDS epidemic, this is the closest our government has come to showing a condom. It’s time to get real about AIDS education.’”

Newspaper features the table of contents from an issue of The Village Voice published shortly after artist David Wojnarowicz’s death from AIDS-related illness.

Gober’s newspaper stack includes a page from the Weddings section of The New York Times with an advertisement featuring the artist modeling a handcrafted wedding dress. It appears next to ads announcing a liquidation sale at the Girl Scouts headquarters, a 40% reduction on summer suits, and Tiffany & Co. engagement bands.

This print was made to resemble a newspaper circular for a grocery store. The image of the roasted pig was staged and photographed by Gober in his New York studio.

This etching is based on a clipping of a 2005 article from the New York Post’s “NYPD Daily Blotter” column. The newspaper fragment has been reproduced actual size and each copy has been distressed by hand to mimic the slightly crumpled appearance of the original clipping.

“Nothing is more gall-bitter than suffering, nothing more honey-sweet than having suffered.”  — Meister Eckhart

Devendra Banhart’s barbarous, nonlinear nomenclature is savage in its nonaggression, and completely at peace with its perverse audacity. The recursive abstracted forms within his canvases are a non-hierarchical alphabet of allegories for the diminishment and destruction of ego. Each mouth, prick, eye, and ass breaks apart and reconstructs itself until they become a collective commune of equally all-important, yet weightless pieces of the tantric universe. They are a cycle of mala beads through the fingers of time.

The Grief I Have Caused You, Banhart’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, is a survey of recent paintings and drawings mostly completed during a year when the Grand Pendulum neglected to swing back to “having suffered.” Though they were sowed in a moment of near-universal hurt, each composition manifests an equal, harmonic measure of joy: grotesque figurations of comedy and tragedy embrace and approach fellatio in “Nyima & Dawa,” 2021; a fat-bottomed, high-heeled hiker rejoices at a finally flat stretch of terrain while a behemoth of a feline looms menacingly overhead in “Twilight Hiker,” 2021; “Offering,” 2021, is a total deconstruction of the elements represented within the first two, a Buddhist garden partially digested by the biome of infinity. (Banhart’s flora includes the cubist and surrealist tendencies of Paul Klee, the expressionistic poetry of Helen Frankenthaler, and the violent gestures of Ethel Schwabacher, to name a few.)

If time is a circular property, then the human condition is a perennial state of suffering and having suffered, often and increasingly all at once. The Grief I Have Caused You is the artist’s rumination on the uniquely personal, yet absolute universality of this push-and-pull. His grief is your grief, but so is his ecstasy.

Devendra Banhart (b. 1980, Houston, Texas) lives and works in Los Angeles. An internationally renowned musician considered a pioneer of the “freak folk” and “New Weird America” movements, Banhart has toured, performed, and collaborated with Vashti Bunyan, Yoko Ono, Os Mutantes, Swans, ANOHNI, Caetano Veloso, and Beck, amongst many others. His musical work has always existed symbiotically alongside his pursuits in the other fine arts. In addition to painting and drawing most of his own album covers (the album artwork for his 2010 album What Will We Be was nominated for a Grammy), he has contributed to Doug Aitken’s multimedia Station to Station project. He has performed at MoMA (New York), MoCA (Los Angeles), The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), LACMA (Los Angeles), and The Broad Museum (Los Angeles). Exhibitions include Voglio proprio vedere, Mazzoli, Modena, Italy (2017); Sphinx Interiors & Other Works, Mazzoli, Modena, Italy (2014, solo); Abstract Rhythms: Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart, SFMoMA, San Francisco (2007–2008); Music is a Better Noise, MoMA PS1, Queens, New York (2007); and Devendra Banhart, Mazzoli, Modena, Italy (2006, solo). His monograph of drawings and paintings I Left My Noodle on Ramen Street (2015, Prestel) features essays by Jeffrey Deitch and Beck. The Grief I Have Caused You is Banhart’s first solo exhibition with Nicodim, and his first in Los Angeles.

Night Gallery is pleased to present a viewing room documenting Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack’s Where the Hood At: A Conceptual Performance Assemblage, a performance presented at Night Gallery in Summer 2020. Gaitor-Lomack is a Los Angeles-based sculptor and performance artist whose work has been included in our group exhibitions Grey Garden and MAJEURE FORCE. 

Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack’s work contemplates the social and spiritual codes inscribed into everyday objects. The idea of reincarnation animates his approach to the traditions of the readymade and the assemblage, as objects are reclaimed, reinterpreted, and given new life. While his readymade sculptures destabilize artifacts of the everyday, Gaitor-Lomack’s objects are not wholly ridded of their social associations. Instead, abstracted from their conventional uses, he opens his sculptures up to new contexts for communal engagement. His performances put these sculptures into practice, activating the works’ imaginative potential while revealing a great and mystical interconnectedness of artist and audience. 

Where the Hood At: A Conceptual Performance Assemblage was presented at Night Gallery on August 29, 2020. The performance was concurrent with MAJEURE FORCE, Night Gallery’s ten-year anniversary exhibition, which included Gaitor-Lomack’s sculpture “Where the Hood At,” 2020. The sculpture, which consists of two parts, is made up of entirely found objects: a rusted pole lodged into a block of concrete; two beer cans fused together; a tennis ball; and a sweatshirt nailed to the wall, its hood cut off. These objects evoke not only human activity but the human body, speaking to our understanding of material goods as extensions of ourselves. The last of these is an explicit homage to, and inversion of, David Hammons’ seminal 1993 work “In the Hood.” Of this lineage Gaitor-Lomack writes,

“Where the Hood At” is an elevated metaphorical response to David Hammons’s “In The Hood” artwork. It continues the conversation. Rather than the average reference, it builds an experiential equation. A stream of street philosophy that’s taboo and revered to the surface level mind frame. If you are like me, then you look for the hood in everything you do. The hood is in my heart like the memory of a sacred ground. It’s far from concrete. It’s a question and an answer to the commercial platform and broad misplacement of Black/Brown geography and essence, which tends to lack the many nuances that are deeply rooted in the prophetic natures of the Black/Brown communities.

Gaitor-Lomack’s performance at Night Gallery presented an activation of “Where the Hood At” alongside a new work, “Eye of Midas,” made for the exhibition. This work featured a magnifying glass duct taped in a glove-like construction to the artist’s hand, appearing as a cyborgian appendage to the artist’s body. The performance found the artist crawling on all fours, inspecting the feet of his audience members. One can detect in the performance documentation a growing ease among the audience, whose confusion morphs into willing participation. If Gaitor-Lomack’s work is an act of redefinition, his performances demonstrate this process in real time, mapping his audience’s gradual understanding and acceptance of the new terms his work creates. 

Following this act of communal imagining, Gaitor-Lomack engaged his sculpture from the exhibition, wearing its headless hood and using its pole as a walking stick, a climbing implement, and a divining rod. Stills from the performance reveal tableaux that evoke Biblical narratives as much as contemporary life, placing his act of myth-making on a continuum with society’s most enduring narratives. 

In addition to the works included in Gaitor-Lomack’s performance at Night Gallery, we are pleased to present several of the artist’s recent sculptures, which were created in a similar process of retrieval and reinvention.

Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack (b. Neptune, NJ, 1988) opened his first solo exhibition at Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York, NY in January 2021, and will present a solo exhibition at Lyles & King, New York, NY, in March 2021. In addition to Night Gallery, Gaitor-Lomack's work has been included in group exhibitions at BBQLA, Los Angeles, CA; ltd, Los Angeles, CA; LAXART, Los Angeles, CA; Transmission, Glasgow, Scotland; and the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA. Gaitor-Lomack is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant and the NXTHVN Fellowship. He lives and works between Los Angeles, CA and New Haven, CT.

Featuring artists from each galleries' program, as well as artists who have not previously exhibited with either gallery, the exhibition presents an immersive experience of Japanese ceramics, sculptural objects, minimal painting, and photography. Taken together, the artworks that comprise Sea Change emphasize the sensibilities shared among a diverse group of international artists working across disparate media and artistic traditions.  Participating artists include: Miriam Böhm, Miho Dohi, Patrick Hill, Kentaro Kawabata, Keita Matsunaga, Barry McGee, Tomohisa Obana, Mitzi Pedersen, Ben Peterson, James Sterling-Pitt, Laurie Reid, Kunié Sugiura, Masaomi Yasunaga and John Zurier.

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present a selection of enamel paintings by Jeffrey Vallance.  For over thirty years Vallance has been known for his drawings, sculptures, installations and performance-based works which make reference to his childhood in California, voyages to the Polynesian Islands and Iceland, residences in Las Vegas and the Arctic, sojourns to the Vatican, and his celebrated Blinky the Friendly Hen project in 1978, when he held a funeral service for a frozen supermarket hen at Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park.  Vallance’s diverse practice offers a unique perspective on the vernacular that is intrinsic to our notions of faith, celebrity, ritual, populist language, and villainy.  This selection of enamel paintings highlight political figures, actors and personalities, writers, and even other artists such as Mike Kelley (the drawing is featured below and the enamel painting is in the collection of The Hammer Museum).  With both humor and an analytic eye, Vallance examines how symbolism and idolatry can shape our past and present understandings of “cults of personality,” both good and evil, horrific and heroic.