Memory and Material at Frieze Los Angeles 2024

At Frieze Los Angeles 2024, artists are grappling with the materiality of memory. Personal and collective histories snag in the warp and weft of our clothes, fade in photographs, are prized in jewelry boxes and are ground into the very pigments with which they paint. Pia Camil, Curtis Talwst Santiago, Carla Edwards, Josh Callaghan, Stephanie Syjuco, Blessing Ngobeni and Su Yu-Xin all explore the potential and limitations offered by working with materials that have their own stories attached. 

Pia Camil’s Multi-Organism (Dots) (2020) suspends multiple pairs of jeans from the ceiling in a mass of limbs. Camil buys second-hand clothes at bartering markets and through exchange in Mexico City, combining her finds into a collective portrait of abutting and overlapping personal material histories. By stuffing the jeans with further pairs, Camil questions notions of individuality and the boundaries between skin and cloth.  

Presented by OMR Gallery.

Curtis Talwst Santiago crafts tiny hand-held dioramas inside reclaimed jewelry boxes. These tableaux memorialize traumatic real-world events, like the murder of Michael Brown in 2014, and experiences from Santiago’s own life. In Soca in the Suburbs (2021), Santiago reflects on his childhood, creating a replica of a party in his parents’ basement from the 1970s. 

Presented by Rachel Uffner Gallery. 

Carla Edwards challenges the fixity of the US flag as a signifier of history and identity, reclaiming the flag’s materiality by cutting it into strips that are dyed, bleached and quilted. Through this process, Edwards makes space for what she describes as the “alchemical” production of a new palette of meaning. Josh Callaghan enacts a similar gesture of transformation. Casting natural plants forms in aluminum, Callaghan encases the organic memory of tumbleweed-like structures in a lustrous, futuristic realm. 

Presented by Night Gallery.

In her latest photographic series, Stephanie Syjuco works with the extensive analog archives of the Manila Chronicle, the prominent post-war Filipino newspaper that was forced to close in 1972 with the country’s imposition of martial law. Syjuco digitizes images and news snippets before superimposing photographs of foliage and political propaganda. In this recontextualization, Syjuco expands the publication’s self-historicizing drive into an expression of reflection and discovery.

Presented by Silverlens.

For his first solo show in Los Angeles, Blessing Ngobeni reveals new large-scale mixed-media works. Ngobeni paints dynamic figurative characters, using imagery from magazines, books and social media. Creating a juncture of visually vulnerable media images and bold paint and pattern, Ngobeni’s works highlight imbalances of power relations. Ngobeni exposes contexts in which power has been abused and points to the failure of the South African government to deliver on Nelson Mandela’s promises of a more equal post-apartheid society.

Presented by Jenkins Johnson Gallery.

At the core of Su Yu-Xin’s practice is an interrogation of the politics of pigment: the pulverization of exploitative ecological and imperial histories and realities into color. Su foregrounds the painter’s role through wars and migrations, territorial invasions and restitutions, allowing us to see the use of color as an inherent act of memorialization.

Presented by MadeIn Gallery.

Further Information

Frieze Los Angeles is at Santa Monica Airport, February 29–March 3, 2024.

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_{Main Image: Stephanie Syjuco, Force Majeure 2, 2023, archival pigment, inkjet print on Hahnemuhle Baryta, 122 × 91 cm, edition of 8 plus 2 artist's proofs. Courtesy the artist and Silverlens}