Reyes Finn is pleased to participate in the 2022 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach with a solo presentation of new work by gallery artist Nikita Gale, open to the public from December 1-3. For the artist’s debut solo presentation at Art Basel and second solo project with Reyes | Finn, Gale will unveil nine works from four separate series. In this project, sculptural form, audio, and etching exemplify the artist’s tendency to trace performance and sound throughout the artist's practice.
Sculpting concrete, metal, light and sound Nikita Gale has become known for interrogating dynamics activated by the presence of social structures. Audience and performer, silence and sound, past and present, decay and permanence are put into question. The vernacular vocabulary of materials becomes alien in the artist’s hands, as oblique references to the human form pull its absence into focus. Such tensions are crystallized by the bodies of work Gale has created for Art Basel.
Among the works featured are two new series of sound sculptures. In GRAVITY SOLO I (HYPERPERFORMANCE), two large red calcite segments ‘play’ a keyboard, producing a humming, droning tone for this performance without a performer. MARMI, an edition of functioning cassette tapes rendered in marble, is Gale’s reversal of the traditional idea of the stone as a metaphor for solidity and permanence. Each tape houses audio recordings of the extraction and refining processes which relentlessly foreground the physical realities of a material historically associated with the symbolic representation of eternal ideals.
The act of documentation operates in various guises throughout the artist’s practice. SMILE I-V activates aluminum panels with CNC drawings of teeth appearing as smiles – the traceable gestures of a machine thereby concretize images of human expression. In this sense, the act of etching illuminates the artist’s ability to mine the tension between absence and presence. For instance, the act of removal or extraction has the ability to leave a permanent mark that transcends the immediate or physical.
Lastly, a monumental iteration from the artist’s new series of wall-hanging sculptures, RECORDING IV, will anchor the center of this presentation. In this work, a rectangular aluminum armature serves as a framework for dynamic layers of concrete-hydrated terry cloth strips. The materials which form this work are also present in the artist’s series, RUINERS, a body of work in which aluminum tubing was contorted into armatures for ecstatic gestural abstraction, also rendered by terry cloth and concrete. This was a consideration of how the artist’s intervention in rendering the armature nonfunctional (and thus ”ruined”) becomes an architectural device of control; RECORDING IV shifts the attention toward the gestures of the concrete as a passive “recording” of movements, the fabric simply frozen in time.
NIKITA GALE (b. 1983, Anchorage, Alaska) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California and holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and earned an MFA in New Genres at UCLA. Gale’s work applies the lens of material culture to consider how authority is negotiated within political, social, and economic systems. Gale has become known for creating kinetic, immersive installations, which have been recently deemed “some of the most vital sound art of recent years” (Art in America, June 7, 2022). Recent solo presentations include showcases at 52 Walker (2022), Chisenhale Gallery (2022), Commonwealth & Council (2022), the California African American Museum (2021), and MoMA PS1 (2020).