GGLA is proud to current Dormmagory, Los Angeles-based artist DL Alvarez’s premiere solo exhibition in Los Angeles and with the gallery. The exhibition’s title is an amalgamation of the Italian “Dormire”, to sleep, and the non-gender particular identify Magory, that means educated and creative. The mixture of the 2 suggests a form of sleeping information: an emotional, intuitive and even unconscious intelligence. Referring to this concept of the unconscious, Alvarez crafts drawings whose supply imagery is pulled solely from textbooks and yearbooks from the latter half of the twentieth Century. Stripped of context, the photographs develop into a non-linear fever dream of graphite and coloured pencil on paper, exploring themes of nostalgia, togetherness, absurdity and the abject.
Alvarez started this collection of drawings throughout the 2020 Covid lockdown, as they taught what was to be one of many final lessons on the historic and now defunct San Francisco Artwork Institute. The scholars had been consciously aiming to replicate the non-linear stream of occasions and references that was their actuality, a timeline divorced of a singular order however as an alternative fluid and disarming. Alvarez’s exhibition takes an identical method in the way in which photos are created, augmented and sequenced. The visions of carefree youth gathering in teams on campus yield a way of nonchalant innocence. But alongside these are darker photos–a pockmarked witch masks with googly eyes and an expansive brim dominates two compositions, a determine slowly emerges from a casket in a haunted home scene whereas in one other, somebody is handcuffed to the ceiling of a picket room, the composition reducing off simply above the determine’s chin shrouding the second on this strained picture that hovers between pleasure, torture and ritual.
Just like previous our bodies of labor during which Alvarez depicted methods during which pixelated photos slowly drew into focus on the web, the artist employs quite a lot of signifies that deter and obscure a simple learn of the photographs chosen. In velvet-crush, a wavy barcode-like overlay envelops the types of two languid lovers. In miniscule energy wrestle, a fragmented comedian of a physician utilizing a stethoscope creeps right into a portrait of a younger lady–hair cascading down over their face furthering the shrouding of appearances and a easy learn.
Using yearbooks, a automobile that immediately enshrines its content material in a haze of heat nostalgia, serves as a compendium of already loaded supply materials for Alvarez. There may be each a hyper-specificity to yearbooks, in that they reference very particular moments and inter-school dynamics to a small group of people, but additionally they observe a set components and are deeply relatable and understood by anybody that survived their highschool years. The drawings inside the exhibition additionally function an exploration of our idea of nostalgia in all of its sides. In a single sense, nostalgia blankets any picture with a rosy tint, but we’re additionally struck with the pitfalls of this uncritical beckoning again to historical past as we take into consideration the intentionally imprecise thesis of MAGA–which claims issues had been higher as soon as, with out the necessity to specify when or for whom. On this sense, DL Alvarez’s Dormmagory is concurrently an exploration of how we construct and assemble that means by way of legibility, context and relation, and an investigation into the methods during which we devour imagery and course of it each consciously and subconsciously, as people, teams, and a collective society.
