Events
Layercake | Exhibition
Curated by Emily Carr alum Mallory A. Gemmel, Layercake is an online exhibition that showcases the work of Los Angeles-based artist Rajab Ali Sayed.
YOUNG SPACE is pleased to present Layercake, the first virtual solo presentation of an extended body of work by Los Angeles-based artist Rajab Ali Sayed.
On view from August 26 - September 20, 2020
Growing up as a queer man between Manilla, Philippines; Karachi and Lahore, Pakistan; and Houston, Texas has influenced Sayed’s process of constructing physical and psychological spaces with paint. Raised and nurtured by a Filipino, Catholic mother and Pakistani, Muslim father, Sayed encounters culture through the mediation of his biracial experience.
His practice is intertwined with his intersectional life experiences and composed of paintings that illustrate thickened narratives of his unique personal history. Sayed’s transience between disparate cultures, geographies, and histories foregrounds his work; he embodies paint as a means to mark and study his distinctly personal mythology, and to reflect upon specific time, place, and existence.
By precisely laminating materials such as pigments and glazes, Sayed prepares his paintings as a way to speak about images and their potential to contain a multitude of narratives.
Like cross-sections or slices of cake, his works are a result of a process layered by traditional painting techniques, colour theory, iconography, and reference to contemporary and historical visual culture.
At the helm of his process, is an exploration of colour, and an understanding of how pigments blend to create tone and depth. For Sayed, depth manifested by colour is not only visual, but also perceptual: he is always thinking about how colour is representational of time and place, culture, and history.
Through these processes, his work carefully renders query about the relational ingredients that coalesce identities such as language, politics, gender, sexuality, culture, and race.
The select works in Layercake generate a consideration of how the agency of creating a self-driven image and presence of identity is a quality distinct to our fluid visual culture. How does the potential to be intentional with the decoration of self-image — in whatever way is seen fit — affect the way we see and live as individuals, with each other, and for our future? How do we recognize the weight of designed self-images and their power to evoke social as well as political conversation, ability, and even, transformation?
– Mallory A. Gemmel