PRIVATE DANCER, 2020, lighting truss and moving head LED lights, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles and Mexico City.
Through the lens of material culture, Nikita Gale examines how authority and identity are negotiated within political, social, and economic systems. Gale frequently assembles readily available objects and ubiquitous consumer technologies in unexpected ways. In GRAVITY SOLO III (HYPERPERFORMANCE), 2022, two large pieces of red calcite “play” a keyboard, producing a humming, droning tone that changes over the course of this performance without a performer. The work’s title draws on the British philosopher Timothy Morton’s notion of the hyperobject, an entity like the pandemic or global warming that is so massive, complex, or vast that it transcends our ability to perceive and understand it. Gale uses calcium, the fifth most abundant mineral on earth and the most abundant mineral in the human body, making up 99 percent of the human skeleton, to create a hyperperformance that surpasses human attention spans, provoking the question of what happens when systems are confronted with a void.
With PRIVATE DANCER (2020) the artist takes the common experience of concerts as a starting point for questioning abstract ideas of spectacle, desire, absence, and refusal. Theatrical lighting trusses are transformed into sculptures, and programmed lights “dance” to an unheard soundtrack of music by Tina Turner. By isolating the visual language of live performance in the gallery and separating it from the expectation of audio, Gale creates an uncanny experience that serves as a meditation on the limits of the body, the demands of celebrity, and silence as a political position.
