The Rethinking Structures Book Club was co-presented with CARLA and focused on the intersections of social justice and art world justice. We invited participants to use art as a gateway into social justice, and social justice as a lens to rethink the art world. Each guest artist who curated a session is a leader in the LA art community and selected a reading to present and discuss with the group.
The second session was led by Nikita Gale, an LA-based artist whose recent work considers the role of audience as a social arena, and examines the ways in which silence and noise function as political positions and conditions. Gale lead a discussion on the Foreword to June Jordan’s Civil Wars, which Gale reads once a season, saying “It’s a perfect summation of everything she was about: standing up after getting your asskicked; not being annihilated by sexism, racism, and homophobia; remembering to imagine what it is that you want.”
Nikita Gale is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. Gale 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 practice is often structured by long-term obsessions with specific objects and the ways these objects gesture towards particular social and political histories. Gale uses ubiquitous consumer technologies as frameworks to consider how individuals potentially reproduce their relationships to objects within their relationships to psychic space and political, social, and economic systems. For Gale, the term “reproduction” is as much a mechanical, technical process as it is a process rooted in sex, biology and the organic.
Gale’s recent work considers the role of audience as a social arena and examines the ways in which silence and noise function as political positions and conditions.
Gale’s work has recently been exhibited at MoMA PS1 (New York); LACE (Los Angeles); Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles); Matthew Marks Gallery (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); Rodeo Gallery (London); Ceysson & Benetiere (Paris); and in “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). Gale’s work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Art21, AQNB, Frieze, Vogue, and Flash Art. Nikita currently serves on the Board of Directors for GREX, the west coast affiliate of the AK Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems.