Image: Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles
Los Angeles artists David Daigle and Lita Albuquerque are scheduled to speak together on Sunday, August 30, at 1 p.m. at Track 16 Gallery’s East Hollywood location. The conversation will take place alongside Daigle’s exhibition ‘The Death of Beauty’, which remains on view at the gallery through September 5.
Located at 706 Heliotrope Drive, the East Hollywood exhibition presents Daigle’s second solo show with Track 16. The exhibition opened on July 18 with a reception and brings together photography and sculptural works that examine the relationship between desire, identity and consumer culture.
Daigle works with found commercial imagery, subjecting photographs and other technical images to physical alteration. His methods include sculptural intervention and décollage, a process in which existing printed materials are cut or removed. Magazine pages, bus-shelter advertisements and wallpaper murals are drilled or perforated, producing surfaces marked by clusters of openings.
According to the exhibition material, these interventions operate as both destruction and excavation. They interrupt images designed to manufacture desire while exposing the material beneath them. The resulting apertures are described as recalling pixels, screens, wounds and voyeuristic openings, challenging assumptions about the photographic print and the authority of media imagery.
The exhibition includes works such as ‘The Death Of Venus’, made from a ‘Birth of Venus’ wallpaper mural layered with birthday wrapping paper and magazine images; ‘Iceberg’, an archival pigment print of a stock iceberg photograph layered with automotive magazines; and ‘Gaza City’, an archival pigment print of a stock photograph of Gaza City from around 2020 layered with a book concerning peace and economic prosperity in the Middle East. Other works incorporate imagery associated with fashion, celebrity, popular culture and consumer advertising. ‘ADHD - Boxed’ (2025) combines an archival pigment print on fabric with punch-cut layers of wrapping paper inside an acrylic box.
Albuquerque is a multidisciplinary artist and writer whose work includes ephemeral and permanent projects in landscapes and public sites. She emerged on the California art scene in the 1970s as part of the Light and Space movement and became known for pigment installations addressing mapping, identity and the cosmos. Her work has been shown in projects including Desert X, the Art Safiental Biennial in Switzerland, Copenhagen Contemporary and the 59th Venice Biennale, and is held in collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Trust, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA and MOCA. She also served for 35 years on the core faculty of the Graduate Art Program at ArtCenter College of Design.
Daigle received a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in 2022. His recent solo exhibitions include ‘Trypophobic Panopticons’ at Track 16 in 2023 and ‘The Pink Opaque’ at the Broad Art Foundation in 2021. His work is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. ‘The Death of Beauty’ is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., at Track 16 Gallery, East Hollywood, through September 5.
