de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Altar Ego, a new exhibition by Nigeria-born, Brooklyn-based artist Layo Bright. The exhibition brings together a group of new sculptures, including the artist’s signature bloom forms, hourglass works, and a series of large glass tiled busts that explore the emotional and psychological terrain of grief, endurance, and renewal. Bright’s practice centers narratives of ancestry, feminism, mass migration, and the African diaspora.

Bright’s bloom works pair cast face molds with individually crafted glass flowers, chosen for their symbolic connection to migration and cultural narratives. Citing her matrilineal heritage, the Nigerian Ife Heads, West African textiles, and contemporary artists such as Simone Leigh, Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, Fred Wilson, and Alison Saar as inspirations, Bright turns to ritual, material transformation, and the fragile architectures of selfhood. These works emerge from a process the artist describes as “a ritual of endurance, rebirth, and grief shedding,” referencing the five stages of grief and the reconstruction of a new identity. Across the exhibition, surfaces shimmer and rupture, presenting sculpture as a site of emotional archaeology.

Through this lens, Bright transforms sculpture into an altar-like space, where personal loss becomes communal reflection and material vulnerability becomes a form of strength. Bright’s practice is distinguished by her hybrid use of glass, wood, and plaster; materials that oscillate between delicacy and resilience. The bloom works appear at once floral and bodily, suspended between growth and collapse. The hourglass forms evoke time as both container and pressure, while the busts, fractured, layered, and luminous, suggest a self continually in the process of becoming. Bright’s work proposes sculpture not as a monument but as a ritual object, an offering shaped by vulnerability and repair.