Opening Reception: June 3rd, 4-7 pm
(Detroit, MI – May 31, 2023) – Reyes | Finn gallery is pleased to present GRAVITY GARAGE, a dynamic new exhibition by Los Angeles–based multidisciplinary artist Nikita Gale (b. 1983). Featuring all new works, the exhibition will engage with the idea of gravity through the use of sculptural form and video installation. The exhibition is Gale’s second solo show at Reyes | Finn.
A trained archaeologist, Gale’s work digs deep, exploring the possibilities and pitfalls of culture making across time, and the interplay between performance and audience. Through layers of materials and media—concrete and metal, light and sound—Gale excavates new ways of understanding the relationship between social structures and material contexts. The vernacular vocabulary of materials takes new form in the artist’s hands, as oblique references to the human form pull its absence into focus.
Among the works on view will be five wall-hanging sculptures from Gale's RECORDING series which recontextualize the material necessities of concrete, terry cloth and aluminum. In a primary sense, these works examine the ways in which visibility and silence function as political positions and conditions. These meditations on material also serve to unpack the longstanding history of concrete as a form of control or authority.
In addition to sculptural works, GRAVITY GARAGE will feature a three-channel video installation, associating time, nature, and gravity
The work arrives during a milestone moment in Gale’s career as the artist was recently the subject of expansive exhibitions at Chisenhale Gallery (London), California African American Museum (Los Angeles), and MoMA PS1 (New York); and follows Gale’s presentation with Reyes | Finn at 2022’s Art Basel Miami Beach.
Writer Hilton Als contributed a recent essay to the artist’s first book, Nikita Gale: IN A DREAM YOU CLIMB THE STAIRS (2023), in which he calls Gale's work “magisterial.” The book also features an interview with Barbara Kruger and four visual essays by Gale.
“[T]he artist explores what moves us, particularly when we are wrapped in a world of sound at a concert,” Als writes. “Somewhere in that moment, with arms raised to exalt in what we may have never heard before but recognize in our hearts, minds, and soul, is the magic of imagining we are free of history and just ‘ourselves,’ even as Gale’s art suggests—lovingly, critically—otherwise.”
The opening celebration of GRAVITY GARAGE will take place on Saturday, June 3rd from 4–7pm and is free and open to the public.
The new show opens after the run of Get Together, a wide-ranging group exhibition that celebrated the work of over 150 Detroit-based artists, and was the largest show in the gallery’s history, and the largest-ever gallery show in Detroit.
TEXT BY NIKITA GALE & KEMI ADEYEMI
“The problem was gravity and the answer was gravity.” –Dionne Brand
““Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity… Grace is the law of the descending movement.” –Simone Weill
Things don’t fall down, they fall and float and slide and flow and drip and rain and slip and roll and crumble toward the earth. A slackening and slouching towards the earth becomes a levitation when inverted. And a descent can become a support when it’s rotated in the right way.
There is gravity as an element of value. Gravity provides a force that gives things weight and makes them measurable by scales. Determining value through weight saves the time of counting things individually but also opens up the possibility of deceiving vision by secretly adding weight to things. The use of false bottoms was a common ancient practice that could make objects appear to be lighter or heavier than they were by adding or removing weight to areas not immediately visible.
The talent of managing gravity is a spectacle. Michael Jordan’s dunk, Kanye’s Saint Pablo stage, Tina Turner’s crane, Michael Jackson’s moonwalk, Evil Knievel, Mae Jemison, and on and on. The term talent emerged in ancient times and most commonly referred to a weight of silver or gold. In ancient Rome, Egypt and Assyria a talent was between 60 – 100lbs, and it has been speculated that this weight was the approximate load that could be carried by one person.
Talent is a capacity for carrying something and to do so, you have to have good proprioception, balance, pacing. You can re-set your body/weight, make adjustments. We're talking about the management of gravity. The naming of talent is not only naming a kind of physical feat that we can then measure and value but is also naming a more conceptual feat: that you’ve defied the laws of gravity in particular and “Nature” (we’re not claiming that term) in general—and you’ve done so in such a way that we ourselves can feel like, or imagine that, there is a There beyond Right Here. The talent was likely measured as the capacity for workers to bear the load; not necessarily, say, the landowners or the merchants. So embedded in the talent—which is the tribute, which is the measurement of the bearer’s value to the landowner or the mayor or the chief or the king or whomever—is an expectation of servitude or dutifulness or a kind of noble dignity in being able to do that work.
What adjustments increase strength and durability and what adjustments hinder it? Is strength really all that special? Is repetitively working against gravity so noble or worthy of applause? Mainstream culture seems particularly obsessed with this “overcoming” narrative in the context of race and gender – one must be gloriously “making adjustments” to have any value. What if instead of adjusting to find balance, you adjusted to let gravity take over more swiftly? That is also a performance and an achievement to do it without injury. Wouldn’t the ultimate burn be “let[ting] gravity take over more swiftly”: dropping your shit or dropping dead. Not falling from grace but with it.