City of Quartz
HVW8 Gallery Berlin
Opens Friday, March 6th, 6 – 10pm
HVW8 Gallery Berlin is pleased to present the group exhibition City of Quartz, showcasing contemporary views of Los Angeles through the work of four inhabitants. The artists Alima Lee, Steven Traylor, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr and Nikkolos Mohammed share poetic visions of the city tied to their personal experiences and environments.
City of Quartz borrows its title from Mike Davis’ eponymous 1990 book about defining moments in the history of Los Angeles. But a lot has changed in those three decades and new realities have since emerged within the city. Rewriting the story with a series of creative impulses, this exhibition casts a light on contemporary LA through the artists’ collected perspectives on identity, memory and desire.
These sentiments are delicately intertwined in Nikkolos Mohammed’s mixed-media works on paper depicting his aunt on her wedding day. Weaving visual markers of his family history into collaged compositions, Mohammed’s work expresses an innate feeling of honor also found in the paintings of Alfonso Gonzalez Jr, which are informed by the artist’s close observation of his father’s skillful trade in commercial sign painting. This ode to everyday rituals similarly characterizes the ‘image/caption’ format of Steven Traylor’s canvases, which root in the present his observations of the complexities of race, sexuality and masculinity within his community. Found imagery is also utilized for introspection in the mixed-media works by Alima Lee, who explores the theme of intimacy through the perspective of black queer pleasure.
City of Quartz is curated by Tyler Gibney and continues an exchange between artists in HVW8’s Berlin and Los Angeles community, initiated with the exhibition Andere Stadt Kein Katalog in December 2019.
Artist Biographies
ALIMA LEE
Alima Lee is a transdisciplinary artist from New York and is currently based in LA. Their work explores themes of identity and intersectionality. Simultaneously balanced and chaotic, their practice is an ongoing experiment in producing physical evidence from a metaphysical exploration of existence. Working in an uninhibited range of mediums from video installation and performance to printmaking and sculpture, Alima is on an ever constant freefall from structure. Their video work is currently on view at Shoot The Lobster gallery in LA and has been presented at the Tate Modern, MOCA, Smithsonian African American Museum, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and ICA Boston to name several of many US locales. Alima is currently a Frieze LA x Ghetto Film School Fellow and Co-Host of a monthly show, “Rave Reparations” on NTS.
STEVEN TRAYLOR
Steven Traylor (b. 1996, Los Angeles) is an artist and photographer living and working in Los Angeles. His practice deals with themes and iconography largely specific to his upbringing in Mid City Los Angeles during the 2000s. Traylor utilizes stark juxtapositions of imagery and text to investigate the complexities of race, sexuality and masculinity within his community. His subject matter is drawn from a range of sources, some deeply personal and others distant, and make reference to shared cultural experiences as well as moments had between himself and others.
The three works on canvas explore how expressions of sexuality and love amongst Traylor’s generation are impacted and shaped by preexisting notions of how black heterosexuality should be presented and enacted. His use of the “image/caption” format ubiquitous to social media firmly roots the work in the present, which is further reinforced by his informal and urgent approach to creating the work. The canvas pieces resist any superfluous aesthetic sensibilities that would distract the viewer from their content.
The nail sculptures serve to monumentalize the stigmatized acrylic nail art popularized by black women. Traylor’s painstaking replication draws attention to the artful and meticulous process that goes into the manicures – a process that is highly regarded by the artist due to its connection to many of the important women in his life.
Traylor’s stance is that of a documentarian, influenced by his formative experiences as a photographer. He applies this approach to his subject matter, as he navigates a space between criticism and commemoration, hoping rather to incite a dialogue than issue a prognosis. A notion Traylor is adamant about upholding, as a young black man who finds he is still being shaped by the conditions he hopes to explore in his work.
ALFONSO GONZALEZ JR
Alfonso Gonzalez (b. 1989, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) is an artist whose work in painting developed from close observation of his father’s skillful trade in commercial sign painting. He draws inspiration in the permanence of hand painted signage and the physical weathering remnants of Los Angeles to narrate his own familial histories of labor and image making.
Through his art practice, Gonzalez synthesizes the bygone era of his childhood where he participated in punk ideology, painted graffiti, and embraced rural ranch culture. By incorporating snippets of his immediate surroundings in his paintings Gonzalez elevates, documents, and reframes the vernacular economies of Southern California.
NIKKOLOS MOHAMMED
Nikkolos Mohammed (b. 1991, Los Angeles) is an artist working and living in Los Angeles. Since childhood, he was introduced to the art of collections through thrifting by his father. He has collections that range from prints to shoes, to sports jerseys and even tuxedo shirts from the seventies. Another facet of collecting was “people gazing” and learning how to observe identities through body language and clothing as a symbol of ideals. He could not have seen value in his collections without studying their history and how people shared them in everyday life. Over time, he realized that some of his collections were also immaterial such as ideas and memories, which inspired his approach to art. This developed his process of creating hybrid identities through hybrid forms.
Pictures by Justyna Fedec.
