‘Heaven ’N’ Earth’: Sayre Gomez blurs the truth and phantasm of Los Angeles

‘Heaven ‘N‘ Earth’, Sayre Gomez’s newest exhibition at Xavier Hufkens, begins with the previous. Underneath the celestial glow of the gallery’s top-floor skylight, a meticulously crafted mannequin of a ramshackle two-storey clapboard home occupies the ground’s centre, surrounded on 4 partitions by photorealistic work of excellent Californian sunsets.

Scale Reproduction of the Previous, Current and Future (Peabody Werden Home) is a recreation of a historic home constructed within the Boyle Heights neighbourhood of LA, shortly earlier than the flip of the twentieth century. When funds for its restoration dried up in 2016, the home was merely lifted off its foundations and moved throughout the road to make method for a brand new condominium block.

‘Heaven ’N’ Earth‘ by Sayre Gomez at Xavier Hufkens

As an unintended monument to LA’s spiralling gentrification and displacement issues, the home symbolises Gomez’s key concern with mapping the bodily and non secular areas left within the wake of the town’s rampant city growth. Fittingly, residents are absent from any of the work and but traces of their unseen lives are all over the place.

On the ground beneath, Gomez’s simulacral renderings of glass emergency doorways evoke the eeriness of a decrepit strip mall. Gomez infuses the floor of every portray with tactile indicators of damage and ageing, additional proof of a uncared for world and the ephemera of commerce that survives it.

Gomez revels on this blurring of artifice and actuality and within the dwelling of Hollywood maybe this ought to be anticipated. Along with the trompe-l’œil of his glass doorways, Gomez digitally manipulates different work by collaging images and including airbrushed particulars to create symbolically resonant compositions.

Giant-scale works like We Pay Money and Progress Maker (each 2023) fuse a foreground of destruction and dinginess with the gleaming glass and metal backdrop of downtown LA’s skyline. In Progress Maker, the hulking type of a concrete paving machine recollects the tractors in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, steamrolling communities within the identify of revenue and fortifying the boundary between wealthy and poor. 

These contrasts between centre and periphery, wealth and poverty, actuality and phantasm, underpin the exhibition as a complete, providing a poignant reflection on a metropolis the place homelessness has grown by round 80 per cent since 2015. Nowhere does this really feel extra stark than within the gallery’s basement, the place the lightwell glass has been tinted orange to infuse the area with an infernal incandescence.