The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) presented a series of four solo exhibitions featuring newly commissioned work by Los Angeles artists Panteha Abareshi, Alexandre Dorriz, Tristan Espinoza, and Maru Garcia. These series of exhibitions reimagined the role of the gallery experience for our current times by presenting research-based artists outside of the white box.

Alexandre Dorriz’s practice investigates power networks often unnoticed behind the facades of public works, researching politics behind public essentials such as space, land-use, and water distribution. Dorriz’s Public Sculpture 001-C took viewers through a journey of research, tallying and mapping the many means and measures involved in advancing an artist’s concept through production phases and public presentation, ultimately revealing the internal exchanges that determinately shape and shift the materialization and fabricated value structuring a commissioned public work. Dorriz’s research-based process unfurls bureaucratic affairs to issue a space for vital conversations in creative production, such as the monetization of creative labor, complicated discrepancies in funding, and the dynamics behind transactions such as donations and public acquisitions and their political substrates.