Please Be Advised

GGLA is proud to present _Please Be Advised_, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Aaron Douglas Estrada, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Meditating on materiality and value and the ways in which we assign worth and disposability under capitalism, _Please Be Advised_ unfolds in a layered manner that incorporates and plays on all senses, with the artist expanding his distinct language and sensibility across space and media in entirely new ways. Much like the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, The single use plastic bag remains a recurring and vital marker throughout the exhibition, with the bags speaking to a range of issues, from the obvious environmental ramifications, to notions surrounding class, disposability and the fragility of life cycles. Protruding from the gallery’s right wall is a department store aluminum hanger displaying handbags that the artist has created out of his melted plastic bag material. The bags mimic the shapes and styles of designer handbags, carrying with them a high end visual language that collides with a materiality built upon expendability and thriftiness. Using an idiosyncratic craft technique, Estrada melts the bags together with other materials, incorporating these thin and transparent shells into larger amalgams that have the feel of a textile or handmade paper. The resulting patchworks incorporate branding specifically tied to businesses from immigrant communities, providing a hyperlocality to the works while conjuring a Proustian effect for any viewer that has frequented one of these establishments.  Along the back wall of the gallery hangs a grid of works built from the artist’s distinctive bag material wrapped around stretchers with the corners left peaking out, subverting a simple read of these collage works as paintings, while providing a pillow-like quality that contrasts the industrial quality of the layered plastic substrate. Across from a wall painted the Pantone color “Pale Banana” is a lone wall that hovers within the space, featuring two drawers protruding from each side of the wall, each full of plastic bags. The work is both tongue in cheek and a literal gesture that speaks to the ubiquity of the “bag drawer” and the ways in which we all metabolize materials and make sense of excess, as well as the layered political and personal histories that are attached to materials, even one as humble as the single use plastic bag. The back room of the gallery features three chain chandeliers, with loops of chain referencing the forms and motifs of Ojibwe dreamcatchers–a feeling of dynamic movement held static by strategic points of welding, bisected by strands of barbed wire. The wire–a potent symbol for protection, mobility and the ways in which we create and police borders, meets the ceiling suspended chandelier and all of the opulence and class associations that accompany them. Accompanying the chandeliers in the gallery’s back room and interjected throughout the space are sound boxes, built from blackened wood, and emblazoned with iconographic imagery showing religious turmoil, self help and the struggles for personal and spiritual success. Each box contains a subwoofer that rattles the box and its surroundings with a deep bass that casts a foreboding and pervasive atmosphere throughout the exhibition, providing an auditory element that melds with the artist’s visual collages. And furthering the immersive quality of Estrada’s exhibition, is a tacky film applied to the floor of the gallery’s back room, capturing the dirt of viewer’s footprints, yielding an unsettling sensation for the viewer, while simultaneously imprinting the viewers presence within the space and the artist’s installation as a kind of sly call for collaboration.