Night Gallery is thrilled to present Mixed Feelings Color Pains, an exhibition of new oil paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Acacia Marable. This marks the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.

The exhibition takes its title from two bodies of work Marable has developed since 2022. Both series are painted onto used dartboards, a continuation of his preference for working with functional objects. Mixed Feelings is the more sculptural series, incorporating wire forms and other materials onto the painting. These ornamentations point towards the racialized experience at the center of the series, which draws its name from Marable’s own position as a mixed-race person. Color Pains operates differently- quieter, more abstract, and minimal- concerned with color as both perception and feeling. Together, the two series ask to be read against each other, their surface differences gradually revealing a shared preoccupation.

Color, for Marable, is never pure. For those of us who can perceive it, color tells us how to move through the world. We absorb its meanings before we have the language to question them: red is hot; blue is cold. White is heavenly. Black is underworldly. Green is nature, as well as sickness and decay. Colors’ meanings change depending on their surroundings- red and blue together, flashing, signal the police. Black, white, green, and red together evoke the Palestinian flag. These are not neutral associations. They are learned, through experience and  culture, conditioning how we move through the world and instructing us how to feel. Marable works in the spaces between color’s perception, meaning, and memory.

In Mixed Feelings Color Pains, the dartboard is the instrument through which Marable’s complex color investigations take form. His homage to the circle. The repetitive paintings’ geometry not only echoes targets to aim at, but also pie charts of statistical breakdowns. Their exploded sections, blurred lines, ornamentation, and painted beauty make them a dizzying landscape in which to play the game of darts. And that is what Marable wants, to make the player contemplate what they are taking aim at. A painting? A person? An idea? Which colors spark their memory, pull their desire, or trouble their aversion? The game, under this new lens, becomes more charged- a quiet rupture from the innocent fun it usually provides.