Opening reception: May 11th | 6pm-9pm

Ever Gold [Projects] presents Give a Dog a Bad Name and Hang Him, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Los Angeles based artist Mario Ayala. Featuring airbrushed paintings on canvas, works on paper, sculptures, and a video installation, this new body of work employs a type of figurative language in which elements coordinate and contradict themselves narratively and spatially. Ayala applies this figurative language to social histories, exploring representations of brownness and Latinx identity within the field of painting, and in the way visual representations are able to echo a discursive reality.

Ayala’s paintings combine sensibilities, connecting disparate images and aesthetic gestures. Ayala credits his father as his primary influence, as he grew up watching him work on cars and motorcycles, and receiving ballpoint pen drawings from him as gifts when he returned home from work as a truck driver. Attending car shows and swap meets in Los Angeles, Ayala was exposed to a variety of painting techniques that are distinct from traditional art world methods: car painting and airbrushing are the artist’s earliest and most poignant references for creative expression. Ayala utilizes these familiar techniques and images in ways that are distinct from their original applications—as a simplified example, Ayala utilizes auto-body painting techniques designed to emphasize or reinforce the physical structure of a car in ways that distort and transform his subjects, or applies the techniques to objects that do not typically garner this kind of elevating treatment.

Although arguably not breaking news, it seems reasonable to reinforce here: Latinx creative endeavors—in music, visual art, tattooing, car culture, and many other areas—permeate popular culture in the U.S. more and more thoroughly, both autonomously and through widespread cultural appropriation. Ayala’s work can be seen as a kind of reclamation with twists, as it embraces iconic images and stylistic gestures while suggesting that these structures are much larger and more dynamic than a common pop cultural representation might convey. Ayala is similarly interested in visual representations of translation and the slippages that can occur with language. In a painting titled Insurance Claim, a sad old dog is seen busting through a steering wheel with text reading “GUYCO” instead of “GEICO,” making reference to the complexity of translation and to Los Angeles’s particular bootleg culture in which counterfeit items attain validation in their own right, both as reasonable stand-ins for authentic items and as mashups that harness the impact of high end branding in the creation of new hybrid forms.

In the gallery’s back room, Ayala presents a video installation titled Casa Padre, which references the name of the shelter for unaccompanied and separated immigrant minors in custody of the U.S. Office of Refugee and Resettlement in Brownsville, Texas. Casa Padre consists of an instructional video on how to put together a fence on your property accompanied by a Riz Ortolani-composed piece made for Paolo Cavara’s film Mondo Cane (translates to “Dog World”), punctuated with propagandistic interjections of strategies to demolish the constructs indicated by the instructional video. The room is transformed to mimic the appearance of the detention center, and sculptures serve as functional seating for viewers of Ayala’s video work. The painted sculptures are modeled after “time out chairs”—furniture designed for misbehaving children, often painted with characters or phrases—but Ayala has built them to a larger scale and ornamented their surfaces in a similar manner to the paintings on view.

Ayala deconstructs and expands common perceptions of his chosen categories of images and aesthetics, offering enough of the original material to represent the traditions from which these forms originate while recasting images and techniques in new roles. Hybridizing images and uniting the incongruous, Ayala builds a visual language capable of mirroring the physical and social transformations of the landscape; Ayala’s compositions are only as strange and layered as the world we live in. In his new video installation and sculptural works, Ayala continues to develop this visual language in new terrain.

Mario Ayala (b. 1991, Los Angeles, California) is an artist, working primarily in painting but also in sculpture. Ayala graduated from The San Francisco Art Institute in 2014, where he received the Yale Norfolk fellowship in 2012. He was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2014. Recent exhibitions include Gold Standard at Ever Gold [Projects] (San Francisco, 2019); AUT Of Body at Loyal Gallery, Stockholm (solo, 2018); Sun Sprawl at Club Pro Los Angeles (2018); Pen Pal at Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco (solo, 2017); Seasoned And Embarrassed Like A Wet Dog at SADE, Los Angeles (solo, 2017); Welcome To The Left Coast at The Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco (2016); Summer Group Show at Hashimoto Contemporary, San Francisco (2016); The House Of Special Purpose at 99¢ Plus Gallery, Brooklyn (2016); Something Completely Different at City Limits, Oakland (2014); 5 Year Anniversary at Ever Gold Gallery, San Francisco (2014); Locals Only at RVSF, San Francisco (2014); and Give + Take at Adobe Books, San Francisco (2013). Ayala lives and works in Los Angeles.