When Sayre Gomez and his wife, Emmy Eves, went shopping for costumes at a Halloween Town pop-up in Los Feliz 5 years in the past, he discovered a thing odd: the store did not bother to set up genuine signage, sloppily affixing its name around the present Toys R Us emblem on the creating. Gomez believed it was the best picture of our economically precarious, psychologically combustible times—“it’s not just a collage of two logos but two financial types colliding,” he says, describing how the bankruptcy of Toys R Us, a traditional retailer, stemmed from e-commerce and gigeconomy operations like Halloween Metropolis.
The impression stuck with him, and in 2021 he at some point made a substantial portray (48 by 175 inches) on shaped aluminum of the odd-combo signage, providing it the ironic title Religious The united states. He then applied “Halloween City” as the identify of his most current present at François Ghebaly gallery and as the title of its centerpiece: a sculpture of a building that also experienced its first goal hijacked. Regarded as The Reef, this monolithic, 12-tale constructing close to Interstate 10 was billed as “a resourceful habitat” but has identified its serious worth as a system for shockingly huge LED video clip billboards marketing Kia vehicles and Patron tequila, among other models.
Gomez’s miniature model comes with its personal LED display that replicates (many thanks to drone images) the unique advert stream, nevertheless with “digital glitches, like black spots or pink stripes to make the ads seem distressed digitally, like the pixels are failing”—a way to puncture the shiny, delighted surface area of technofuturism. The Reef is just one instance, he suggests, of how “data is more beneficial than oil and this world is not what it appears to be. We have this crumbling bodily world and then we have the metaverse replacing it. It’s a strange moment, like the weirdest a person it’s possible.”
Gomez, 40, specializes in this weirdness that masquerades as each day daily life, turning in excess of-the-top LED displays, billboards, posters and other roadside signage into the central and inescapable matter of his artwork— occasionally as sculptures, but most frequently as airbrushed paintings that include things like trompe l’oeil flourishes like doorway frames and windowsills. (Architecture is also the emphasis of a new demonstrate in Turin at the Basis Sandretto Re Rebaudengo that skewers the fantasy of dwelling like a king in downtown LA, wherever a individual established of Italianate condominium complexes attempts to create the illusion of a timeless pre-urban lifestyle.) Though he has lived in the greater LA place for around 15 decades, his knack for noticing items that the rest of us take for granted makes him appear to be like a perpetual transplant. Elevated in a Chicago suburb by a one mom, Gomez moved with her as a teen to Fayetteville, Arkansas. He eventually returned to the town for a summer time software at the College of the Artwork Institute of Chicago and, as a comics admirer who beloved to redraw favorite people like Wolverine, he plugged into the community skatepunk-graffiti scene, spending awareness to the missed urban edges.
Some art critics connect him to Ed Ruscha, but he shrugs off the comparison. “We both paint the LA landscape, and we are LA painters working with airbrushes. But there’s no romance or nostalgia in my perform. Why would you be romantic about a civilization collapsing ahead of your eyes?” The greater comparison could be John Baldessari since of his background of zeroing in on Southern California’s most common but unbelievable features (like impossibly tall, skinny palm trees) and exploring the unstable character of photographic “truths.”
“Photography right before the Web had the ring of truth,” Gomez claims. “Now most people understands about Photoshop. Airbrush’s first purpose was image retouching so it’s intrinsically linked to a whole lot of difficulties I’m interested in discussing.”
Right after earning his B.F.A. at SAIC, exactly where he shifted from graphic design to painting, he went on to get his M.F.A. from CalArts, still a hotbed of conceptual artwork. “It was so tricky I was in above my head because I can barely examine. I got to CalArts and the principle point genuinely freaked me out,” he says. But he related with CalArts guru Michael Asher on a personal level and with the landscape of strip-shopping mall peculiarity, typically driving aimlessly “just to find out about the town.” Soon after graduating he labored odd work opportunities and held small-lived assistant gigs for artists Tony Berlant, Kaari Upson and Paul McCarthy. His significant break arrived in 2013 when Ghebaly brought his perform to the NADA art honest in Miami and sold six pieces to collectors Don and Mera Rubell, which includes “text-paintings that had these growing old results,” the gallerist claims. “Sayre has this outstanding capacity to render the texture of aged surfaces, no matter whether it is bleached-out paper from a poster or the surface of a soiled window.”
Gomez was, at that time, working out of a smaller corner of a building in Boyle Heights that utilised to be a stitching and embroidery manufacturing facility. He has considering that acquired the constructing, renting out some sections to other artists. Most not long ago the Wide museum bought two huge paintings from his “Halloween City” show with plans to exhibit them within the 12 months. As for the sculpture by that identify, Ghebaly stories they’re “finalizing an acquisition by a key American museum,” describing it as a person of the artist’s most perceptive artworks, which “allows us to understand our metropolis in a distinctive way.”
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