This is the first book by the acclaimed artist- Nikita Gale: In a Dream You Climb the Stairs. Through the lens of a multifaceted practice, Gale examines themes of invisibility and audibility, interrogating the dynamic between performer and spectator, structure, and decay. Produced with great care, this extraordinary book is reflective of the artist’s practice.
Authors: P. Staff, Hilton Als, Bénédicte Boisseron, Nikita Gale, Barbara Kruger
Publisher: Hurtwood Press
Language: English
Softcover, 268 pages
10 in x 8 in
ISBN: 978-0903696555
About the Artist
Nikita Gale (b. 1983 Anchorage, Alaska) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California and holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and earned an MFA in New Genres at UCLA.
Gale’s work explores the relationship between materials, power, and attention. A key tenet of the artist’s practice is that the structures that shape attention determine who or what is seen, heard, recorded, remembered, and believed.
Gale’s practice examines the ways in which silence, noise, and visibility function as political positions and conditions. Gale’s broad-ranging installations – often comprising concrete, barricades, video and automated sound and lighting – blur formal and disciplinary boundaries, engaging with concerns of mediation and automation in contemporary performance. By approaching reproduction as a mechanism that connects humans to a desire for extension and amplification through both biological and industrial processes, the artist’s work points to the ways that technology not only functions as an extension and amplification of the body but also as a means by which labor and violence are displaced and concentrated.
The artist’s work has recently been exhibited at Tate Modern (London), Chisenhale (London); LAXART (Los Angeles); 52 Walker (New York); MoMA PS1 (New York); Kunstraum Kreuzberg (Berlin); Swiss Institute (New York); California African American Museum (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); and in “Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing” at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) and “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles).
Gale’s work has appeared in numerous publications including Texte zur Kunst, Mousse, Art in America, Art21, AQNB, Frieze, Vogue, and Flash Art. Nikita is a Contributing Editor at Triple Canopy.
The artist’s work is included in the collections at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California; Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; Pérez Art Museum, Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami, Florida; The Studio Museum, Harlem, New York; and Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom.
