Glean New Deal
March 4 - 26, 2022
Open Saturdays 12 – 4pm, or by appointment
Closing: March 26, 4 - 6pm

Shelly Badal
Misha Davidoff
Spencer Earthworm
Alexandria Hall
Mia Hernandez
Anderson Matthew
KA McMahon
Ari Salka
Cove Tsui
Dylan Zarate

...the gleaner becomes uncanny, unstable, deviant, animal, technological, and ultimately of a piece with the trash that she or he relies on. —Amanda Boetzkes, Plastic Capitalism

In September 2020, three of us trekked along the hot concrete slant of the LA River bank with garbage bags in hand. I yanked a rusty grate from the water with bravado, but it was too heavy to carry. We trotted on and a young woman called out from the bike path, “You forgot a really big piece of trash!” We looked at her, confused, afraid she was trying to hold us accountable for the giant grate I had just extracted. “Me,” she hollered, “I’m the trash.” Oh, gosh. 

Like a lot of things in art, making work from found (salvaged, upcycled, repurposed, etc.) objects does not usually hit as significant until the artist themselves has accrued some sort of reputation, even the slightest amount of girth. At that point, the mechanisms of providing context are ushered in warmly, words like “alchemy” are bandied about, the viewer at large is invited to consider the profundity of infusing a devalued thing with value.

In our day of waste and garbage, what is lovely is that anyone can (and anyone certainly does) taste this profundity pretty much whenever they want. In her consideration of Agnès Varda’s Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), Amanda Boetzkes writes that the gleaner is “the caretaker of the garbage” as well as a “a hinge between the human world and what lies beyond its end.” She continues to say that gleaning is “fundamentally an anti-capitalist gesture” and a “form of acquisition that is a practice of living generously.” A liminal space of care based on anti-capitalist generosity? What a place to be! And given how trashed-up the world is, could it very well be possible to find, or make, that place anywhere? At the very least, it’s a fun premise. 

The artists in Glean New Deal were asked to make a work with something gleaned in Los Angeles, preferably a discarded item found on the street and free-of-charge. We tried to let the assignment find us, and this – the ten works in this show – is what we found. 

Shelly Badal works within a sensory practice to cultivate relatedness and presence via performance, sound, language, visual art, and community organizing. Her recent A/V pieces blend abstraction with vérité footage using analog and digital processes. shellybadal.com / @seventh.spiel

Misha Davidoff is an editor and translator at Tele-. Born and raised in Mexico City, he currently lives in Los Angeles.

Spencer Earthworm Transexual corporate artist. spencerearthworm.com / @spencerearthworm

Alexandria Hall is a writer and musician. Her debut poetry collection Field Music (Ecco, 2020) won the National Poetry Series. She is a founding editor of tele- and is currently a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at USC. alexandria-hall.com / @alexandriakhall

Mia Hernandez is an experimental animator and teaching artist based in El Sereno. Mia is a recent graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, where she received a bachelors in Experimental Animation. The artist's work tends to utilize bright colors and focuses on her family, culture, community, and identity. @idisagree

Anderson Matthew is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His work centers on film experimentation and queer perspectives. His short, experimental and documentary projects have shown internationally, including work commissioned by the Staatsoper Stuttgart. He is the writer and director of the feature film Baja Come Down and creator of the essay anthology Deviant Proposals: An Anti-Binary Journalpublished by Candor Arts. His first solo exhibition Some Things Hidden / Some Things Undone took place in Los Angeles at Flower Head in 2021. Anderson is co-creator of Shadow Kitchen, a Los Angeles filmmaker collaborative, and is co-creator of the LA Cinema Calendar. He holds a BFA from Chapman University. andersonmatthew.com / @and.matthew

KA McMahon (pronounced KAY-AY) is a multidisciplinary artist who was raised in Atlanta, GA, and became an individual by the train tracks and rivers of Athens, GA. Their work is created using collected materials, images, and sounds to recontextualize an experience of Place. Their textile sculptures, videos, and performances are time-based collages that describe a web of relationships within their immediate environment and community. KA prefers to experience their current residence, Los Angeles, via bicycle. @oh.ka.y

Ari Salka (b. 1993 in Seattle, WA) is an LA-based artist, primarily working through painting and drawing. Salka holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016) and MFA in Painting from UCLA (2019). Salka studied at the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art and received the Ellen BattellStoeckel Fellowship in Norfolk, CT (2015). In Ari Salka: On Bodies (Be)held Trans Rights are Under Siege; This Artist Resists by Julie Schulte for Artillery Magazine in September 2020, Schulte states “Salka’s paintings resist; not only by showing us non-binary bodies, but hands prepared to reach out and lead us beyond the present political limitations, into a realm where these bodies are not withheld from view, not merely visible, but beheld and, most importantly, in their dynamic, breathing, singing, multitudinous forms—held.” arisalka.com / @drawingwithpaint

Cove Tsui is just a regular guy in Los Angeles. covetsui.com / @innerspeckledflower

Dylan Zarate // DNZ is a multimedia artist currently residing in the Greater Los Angeles area. Their work focuses on the transience of identity and the boundaries in which one exists, presenting these concepts through an absurdist lens. They work primarily in sound, image, and video, but sometimes as model. As soundscape creator, Zarate creates under the monogram DNZ and released their debut album, “Dramaturgy,” in 2021. informationandentropy.net / @dylanzarate