The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery is pleased to present Gravity, a solo exhibition by David Alekhuogie (b. 1985, Los Angeles, CA). The exhibition will feature a series of newly-commissioned works that use gravity as a metaphor for human struggle. This includes a series of backboard paintings, produced by the artist’s repeated attempts to jump and hit the canvas with his hand. The strenuous mark-making of this gesture, one that emulates the physical movements of a basketball player, undercuts the apparent precision of minimalist painting. In these works, physical striving and falling become a metaphor for the precariousness of freedom in America, a much mythologized notion that remains out of reach for many. Gravity also includes a number of photographs of models wearing low-slung pants that reveal the top of their underwear, a trope of urban hip hop culture that has been widely censured and even criminalized in some cities. The torsos in these photographs are juxtaposed with a series of concrete sculptures that have been cast from unclothed male underwear mannequins, a nude that is generally viewed as benign. Here Alekhuogie points to the ways in which black and brown bodies are singled out for containment and control. The underwear motif is reframed in an installation of new mural photographs that Alekhuogie created by cropping the image and reducing it to horizontal swathes of color and fabric. Captured in diffuse light and printed on satin, these normally contentious garments become abstracted, painterly images that blur the line between flat photograph and sculptural object. The artist illustrates how transgressive imagery can be rendered palatable through artistic devices. Alekhuogie explores the formal and conceptual history of media technologies and their impact on identity politics today. His recent work examines the visual poetics underlying the way intersecting cultures consciously and unconsciously assign value to race, and gender in America. Trained primarily as a photographer, Alekhuogie takes a multidisciplinary research approach that spans textiles, collage, video, photography, and sculpture. ***** The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery is pleased to present the first institutional solo exhibition in Los Angeles by artist Mariah Garnett. Surveying Garnett’s work to date, the exhibition includes a selection of her films and installations from 2010 to the present day, alongside related prints. At the heart of the exhibition will be an installation of her new film Trouble, a feature-length experimental documentary about the artist’s burgeoning relationship with her Northern Irish father, whom she only met in adulthood. The film travels to his native Belfast, in Northern Ireland, where Garnett immerses herself in past and present political struggles, collapsing the city’s legacy of sectarian violence and her father’s Civil Rights activism with the landscape of the present day. The film highlights the ways in which people, as much as places, can carry traces of past histories. A deeply personal investigation, Trouble has been in the making for over four years and represents the culmination of all of the works in the exhibition.