Nikita Gale

Nikita Gale (b.1983 Anchorage, Alaska) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Gale’s practice explores the ways in which silence, noise, and visibility function as political positions and conditions. Frequently incorporating concrete, barricades (such as in the work RUINER XVIII from 2022), video, and automated sound and lighting, Gale’s installations blur formal and disciplinary boundaries, engaging with concerns of mediation and automation in contemporary performance.

Gale is interested in performance and the relationships between absence and presence, specifically the ways that humans often signify their presence through the removal or extraction of material. The disembodied sets Gale makes typically evoke a sense of longing through absence, the lost subject in the centre spurring the viewers to wonder why these actors have left the stage. Rather than directly showcasing a performer or their performance, Gale typically prefers to suggest the spectacle and infrastructure of these productions. In doing so, the artists attempt to highlight all of the often-unseen labour and other forms of support that are left in the margins of the culture industry.