In-Gallery Performance by Mia Carucci

Arresting for their architectural supports, technicality, and refined surfaces, Mario Ayala’s paintings allude to abundant cultural histories not only in subject matter, but through technical and material investigation. Embracing music as an influential part of his process, the title of Ayala’s solo exhibition, his first at the gallery, is borrowed from a 1956 doo-wop song. While The Chips’ “Rubber Biscuit” exemplifies an up-tempo, light-hearted, nonsensical classic, it's also, paradoxically, about hunger and scarcity. The song's mostly unintelligible lyrics performed in a dadaist poetry-scat manner, evoke the use of humor and satire to address social struggles, using imagination and expression as the last available tools of agency. With these themes in mind, and following Ayala's concept of the exhibition as a kind of remix, Rubber Biscuit offers a capacious view of absurdities and questions associated with ritual and design, trade and tradition, and the ideas that permeate the artist’s work and illustrates a commitment to mining the intersection of the widely-shared and intimately autobiographical.