A Bird's Eye View

‍Nikita Gale pays attention to the details. When Gale attends a concert, the artist looks at the structures that frame, uphold, and channel the performance. The Alaska-born, Los Angeles-based artist approaches the pop industrial complex like an anthropologist—a natural progression from past lives as a music photographer and an undergrad at Yale University studying anthropology and archaeology.

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Inside Gale’s exhibition at Petzel’s Chelsea location in New York, “NOSEBLEED,” the walls are bare save for a slanted, mirrored surface that consumes one side of the gallery room to a disorienting effect. A blown-up black-and-white image of a stadium is emblazoned across vinyl lining the floor, illuminated by intricate stage lighting. The installation, entitled NOSEBLEED, 2024, is a stage itself for the assorted sculptures and framed photographic prints strewn out across the floor.

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In two such works, a caramel velvet fabric in SCENE 1 and SCENE 2, both 2024, disrupts the otherwise monochrome tableau. Draped across aluminum bars in organic shapes, the mixed-media work resembles animal hides or theater curtains. Elsewhere there are photographs of stages captured from above in a dizzying blur, a close-up image of an open mouth, a tunnel. In ACCUMULATION (RENAISSANCE/ERAS), 2024, a pile of small aluminum shapes mimic spots on seating charts for either Beyoncé or Taylor Swift’s record-breaking tours.

Deconstructed model buildings aptly titled ARENAS 1-4, 2024, draw from modern entertainment complexes Madison Square Garden and the AO Arena in Manchester—both can hold approximately 20,000 spectators. The source material can also be traced back to two unrealized projects from the past: the Deutsches Stadion designed by the chief architect of the Nazi regime, Albert Speer, and the late Italian architect Gaetano Ciocca’s design for Mussolini’s Theatre of the Masses. 

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While Speer’s massive sports complex was never completed, its megalomaniacal ambitions to spatially and ideologically dominate reveal an underlying subtext of large-scale venues, period. Similarly, Mussolini’s Futuristic blend of classic Greek and Roman architecture was conceived to unify the public and spread propaganda in response to a wave of avant-garde theater sweeping Italy that incited political resistance and would eventually contribute to the end of the fascist regime. At Petzel, the similarities between each design is underscored. If ideology and a desire to dominate is embedded in architectural choices, what does it say that these four structures appear interchangeable?

These industrial and functional frameworks offer a new paradigm for understanding the politically and socially charged context of public arenas. Who deserves to be on a stage and who is kept out? Who is running the show? The difference between attraction and distraction is a line in the sand. Neck craned down from above, we reach forward to get as close as possible. But what are we really looking at? Beyonce and Swift put on Internet-breaking shows, but the spaces that they operate within are the object of Gale’s ongoing fascination.

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In 2020, Gale’s performance AUDIENCING at MoMA PS1 turned the spotlight onto the viewers with a circle of chairs, glaring stage lighting, a massive commercially-produced platform that played a distorted playlist of pop songs sans performer. The stage appeared again in Gale’s first solo exhibition in the UK, “IN A DREAM YOU CLIMB THE STAIRS” at Chisenhale Gallery, in 2022, where the remnants of a performance were reimagined with aluminum sculptures staged as crowd-control barriers. That same year, for an installation at 52 Walker, “END OF SUBJECT,” the artist again turned to a scene of aftermath with dismantled bleachers, ground lights, wire: an archaeological site of the thrills of late-stage capitalism. 

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Today, Gale’s multi-sensory installation both preserves and imagines the decay of monumental arenas past and present. What’s left is fertile ground. As the artist continues to explore how the spectator and the performer are mediated by design, the resulting work increasingly points at a third more liminal role beyond the perimeter all together, one that silently arrives after the final curtain call to excavate what was left behind. 

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“Nikita Gale: NOSEBLEED” is on view through June 8, 2024 at Petzel Gallery at 520 W 25 St, New York, NY 10001.