Immersing the audience in sound and light Nikita Gale's END OF SUBJECT subverts understandings of viewership by prompting spectators to question their subjecthood within 52 Walker's site-specific installation. Creating an aurally and visually rich environment, Gale engages with the architecture of the surrounding space, stimulating all senses through site-specific installation and muses on the boundaries of performance art. Considering and fracturing the physical space of the installation, the artist employs abolitionist ideology and institutional critique to simultaneously rupture and rebuild facets of the art institution.
With an introduction by Ebony L. Haynes and a suite of poems by Harmony Holiday, this publication considers Gale's multidisciplinary approach to address historical hierarchies of visibility. A text by the esteemed artist Andrea Fraser offers reflections on the various interventions at play during a gathering held in the exhibition.
Author Biography:
Born in 1983 in Anchorage, Alaska, Nikita Gale received a BA from Yale University, New Haven, in 2006, and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2016. Gale also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, Maine, in 2019. In 2022, Chisenhale Gallery, London, will present Gale's first European solo exhibition. The artist has had other notable solo exhibitions and commissions at institutions such as LAXART, Los Angeles (2022); the California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2021); Anchorage Museum, Alaska (2021); MoMA PS1, New York (2020); The Visual Arts Center at The University of Texas at Austin (2019); Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2018). Gale is represented by 56 Henry, New York; Reyes|Finn, Detroit; and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. The artist resides and works in Los Angeles.
Ebony L. Haynes is a writer and curator from Toronto. She is based in New York, where she is a director at David Zwirner. Haynes has previously held positions as visiting curator and critic at Yale School of Art in the Painting and Printmaking program, and director at Martos Gallery and Shoot The Lobster NY & LA. Haynes sits on the boards of Artists Space and the New Art Dealers Alliance. She also runs an online "school" that offers free professional practice classes to Black students worldwide.
Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, and the author of five collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever and the forthcoming Maafa (Jan. 2022). She curates an archive of griot poetics and a related performance series at LA's MOCA and a music and archive venue 2220 arts that she runs with several friends, also in Los Angeles. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, and a research fellowship from Harvad. She's currently showing a film commissioned for LA's 2020-21, and working on a collection of essays and a biography of Abbey Lincoln, in addition to other writing, film, and curatorial projects.
Andrea Fraser is an artist whose work investigates the social, financial, and affective economies of cultural institutions, fields, and groups. She is Professor and Interdisciplinary Studio Area Head at the UCLA Department of Art. Her most recent books include Andrea Fraser: Collected Interviews 1990-2018 (2019, copublished by A.R.T. and Walter Koenig); and 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics (2018, copublished by the CCA Wattis Institute, Westreich/Wagner Publications, and MIT Press).
