Exhibited September 8 - November 17, 2024 at TORUS gallery in Los Angeles.
Artforum.com "Must See"
Installation View: The Angeleno
Postfire Confinement Complex
2024, wood framing studs, hardware, dried black mustard
9.7 x 8 x 6 feet
Black mustard is an invasive species that has the propensity to light trees on fire due to its height, and without control it rapidly reoccupies burnt areas, displacing native species. Its population appears to be presently controlled in Malibu in response to the Woolsey Fire which destroyed at least 670 structures including over 400 homes.
California, including Los Angeles County, has relied on cheap prison labor to fight and control wildfires. Prisoners have traditionally received $2 per day or $1 per hour fighting active fires. The dimensions of the artwork are consistent with a solitary confinement cell, alluding to inmate firefighter-labor that is used to control wildfires.
Demolition at LACMA
2024, UHD video, 50 minutes 12 seconds
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art demolishes four of its historical exhibition buildings to make way for the new Peter Zumthor building. Footage shot between May and September 2020.
BLOOM CONFLAGRATION
2024, UHD video, 16 minutes 58 seconds
Exploring what grows after the wildfire, BLOOM CONFLAGRATION contemplates post-Woolsey Fire landscapes in Malibu. New housing is built and sold on terrain that has already burnt. Native and invasive plant species rapidly take the place of old plant life to reinvigorate the postfire landscape. The materiality of burnt trees haunts a new bloom which allegorically fuels the next fire.
Los Angeles City Council Tent Evictions
2024, UHD video, 20 minutes 10 seconds
Using Los Angeles Municipal Code 56.11 during Covid, the City of Los Angeles unconstitutionally dumped unhoused people’s vital large possessions which include tents. This increased hardship for unhoused people and led to many deaths. Also in the middle of Covid, the Los Angeles City Council enacted and amended LAMC 41.18 to ban sheltering within 500 to 1,000 feet of schools, parks, shelters, and government buildings which include public libraries. Covid outbreaks occurred in unhoused shelters before, during, and after the Los Angeles City Council’s 41.18 amendment and enforcement. By enacting 41.18, the LA City Council ostensibly sought to make homelessness invisible while simultaneously putting unhoused people’s lives in greater danger as there was little probability of receiving permanent housing in exchange for giving up one’s possessions to enter temporary housing solutions. While 41.18 was enforced annual unhoused death spiked to 2,201 in 2021, from 1,811 in 2020, from 1,281 in 2019.
Live/Work Demolition
2024, one hundred twenty-one 4x5.3” digital prints of iPhone photos arranged in a grid with one-inch gaps between photos
54 x 68.3 inches
In order to successfully end a two-year lease on a residential-permitted commercial space in South Los Angeles in a complex that was pragmatically unlivable, the artist documented the demolition of his live/work studio. Ordered chronologically by column, the photographs were taken during the demolition up through final departure of the site.
Life after Loss
2021-ongoing, artist’s tooth, soil collected from the LA River, moss collected in Los Angeles County, concrete fragment collected after protest against dismemberment of Echo Park Lake unhoused encampment, terrarium, French cloche, wood base
17 x 13 x 13 inches
In a landscape of structural oppression, instability, and precarity the artist’s tooth cracks under extreme pressure and becomes dislodged. With moss collected from the County, soil taken from the LA River, and a concrete foundation collected after activist resistance to oppression, the artist builds a new home for his tooth, every day providing sufficient water and light for new growth to emerge. Instability maintains itself within the semi-sealed environment, and in a perpetual cycle new life takes the place of what was.
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Life after Loss (early portrait)
2021/2024, photograph
20 x 24 inches, 21 x 25 inches framed
The portrait was taken in the shared living space of the artist’s South Los Angeles live/work space. The work represents an early stage of regenerative growth and allegorically proposes utopian possibilities for the future in the context of temporally contiguous turmoil.
Brassica nigra
2024, photograph
9 x 12 inches, 10 x 13 inches framed
The artist takes a photograph of black mustard lit by sunlight on the balcony of his new domestic space.