Sayre Gomez presented solo exhibition Déjà Vu at Los Angeles’ Ghebaly Gallery, which opened October 14 and ran to November 18.
The Los Angeles-based artist presented a multimedia installation with an accompanying text by writer and curator Olivian Cha. As you walk into the space, you are first met with the enraged gorilla character from Disney’s Dumbo (1941) who plays on a small screen through six-second loop. Remaining in a state of perpetual protest, the video “sets a tone of eternal return, prefacing several repetitions and recurrences throughout the exhibition.”
Symbols of confinement and closure continue with fences, closed doors and painted windows throughout the space. Cha notes that the works become a “cooptation of a collective imagination, one in which power, violence, and domination are championed and perversely aestheticized.”**