Nikita Gale: IN A DREAM YOU CLIMB THE STAIRS
Chisenhale Gallery presents LA-based artist Nikita Gale’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Gale sculpts concrete and metal, light and sound.
"Chisenhale Gallery presents LA-based artist Nikita Gale’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Gale sculpts concrete and metal, light and sound. Composing atmospheric, large-scale installations, Gale’s practice orbits themes of invisibility and audibility, interrogating the unstable relationship between performer and spectator, structure and ruin.
Building on Gale’s RUINER series (2020-present)—aluminium armatures evoking crowd-control barriers, wrapped with concrete-saturated strips of cloth—this new commission, IN A DREAM YOU CLIMB THE STAIRS, consists of remnants of a performance rendered in concrete. The exhibition takes Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon as its starting point, notably the character of Circe, who shares her home with a pack of Weimaraner dogs. Referencing a passage from the book in the exhibition’s title, Gale brings to life an ambitious interpretation of Circe’s feral and free domain—once a grand house, now a decaying testament to the greed and violence of the family she previously served but outlived.
Two conical spotlights and pleated swathes of theatre curtain, ten metres in length, punctuate the gallery. Concretised knotted dog leads, which hang chandelier-like from the ceiling, have been woven into the kinds of elaborate knots a dog might make when left unattended with their restraints. Commands used by humans to summon dogs interrupt the gallery’s stillness. The sound activates a lighting sequence—designed with Gale’s ongoing collaborator Josephine Wang—which intermittently illuminates the exhibition, making reference to the dichromatic vision of dogs. " — e-flux, July 4, 2022
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the e-flux website.
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