ABOUT
Nikita Gale is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California and 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 work explores the relationship between materials, power, and attention. A key tenet of the artist's practice is that the structures that shape attention determine who or what is seen, heard, recorded, remembered, and believed.
Gale's practice examines the ways in which silence, noise, and visibility function as political positions and conditions. Gale’s broad-ranging installations – often comprising concrete, barricades, video and automated sound and lighting – blur formal and disciplinary boundaries, engaging with concerns of mediation and automation in contemporary performance. By approaching reproduction as a mechanism that connects humans to a desire for extension and amplification through both biological and industrial processes, the artist’s work points to the ways that technology not only functions as an extension and amplification of the body but also as a means by which labor and violence are displaced and concentrated.
The artist’s work has recently been exhibited at Chisenhale (London); LAXART (Los Angeles); 52 Walker (New York); MoMA PS1 (New York); Kunstraum Kreuzberg (Berlin); Swiss Institute (New York); California African American Museum (Los Angeles); Cubitt (London); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); and in “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles).
Gale is represented by Petzel (New York), 56 Henry (New York), Commonwealth & Council (Los Angeles), and Emalin (London).
Gale’s work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Texte zur Kunst, Artforum, Mousse, Art in America, Art21, AQNB, Frieze, Vogue, and Flash Art. Nikita is a Contributing Editor at Triple Canopy, a magazine and publishing platform based in New York City and a former board member of GREX, the west coast affiliate of the AK Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems. Currently, Gale serves on the Artist Advisory Councils of the Hammer Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and is a member of Salmon Creek Farm's Community Council.