Henry Taylor is pleased to present Lucid within the Dream, Touch Yourself You are Breathing, artist Derrick Maddox’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, curated by Yael Lipschutz. Collected on daily walks taken through his Cypress Park neighborhood in Northeast Los Angeles, the discarded objects in Maddox’s unique take on arte povera function like linguistic building blocks for a forgotten mother tongue. “Do words and objects have meaning, or do people bring meaning to them? I examine the underlying foundation embedded within miscommunication and perception. It happens at all levels, between cultures, sexes, races, individuals.” Maddox sees his work as a sociological or psychological investigation of the human psyche, and his art as a product of those investigations. Central to his investigations is a fascination with quotidian material - junked toys, abandoned street signage, thrown out food packaging - and the poetic symbolism laying dormant within. Most inventive is Maddox’s series of paintings and prints on slices of white bread. Some of the bread radiates with images of cultural icons: Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, Eminem, Martin Luther King, Jr. Others are text-based. “We Buy Houses,” reads one slice. “Whitey World,” “obama,” “Free Martha” (referring to Martha Stewart’s prison stint), read others. Often the bread is laid out flat on tabletops with burnt or plain slices installed in between, a formal or syntactic device that transforms the bread works into ingenious pieces of concrete poetry. Elsewhere Maddox piles the bread inside larger sculptures. In the center of the gallery is a birdcage filled with bread featuring the images of young African American men, all killed by the police in the past year. Installed above the cage are three sculptures/words: “MAKE,” “AGAIN,” “GREAT.” Opposite this indictment of the American dream sits a more enigmatic object: a tiny rattan peacock chair, the kind made famous by Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton. Glued to the chair is a piece of bread featuring an African man in profile wearing a royal crown. Taken from a 17th century print, the image belongs to the “Blackamoor” tradition, a racist European art style from the Early Modern period featuring African males in subservient or exoticised form. Seated as if on a throne, the image of this unknown man is ghostly, the pigment sitting mysteriously atop the bread. Whether Christlike or otherwise, it resembles the Shroud of Turin, and along with the other bread images, edges the body of work in the direction of transcendental ritual. - Yael Lipschutz