L.W.D. // North Country
On view January 4–February 9, 2025
Opening reception Saturday, January 4 (2–4pm)
Nationale is pleased to welcome Los Angeles based painter and sculptor L.W.D., aka Little Walt Dog, for his debut exhibition with the gallery. Co-curated by Gabriel Garza, North Country is a visual requiem for an urban life under constant surveillance. The oil paintings that make up the body of work on display echo scenes of a bustling city life. Cars have long been the focal point of L.W.D.’s creative practice as a nod to his own upbringing in a southern Los Angeles culture steeped in classic cars and lowrider culture. Raised between the neighborhoods of Watts, Compton, Gardena, and Torrance, L.W.D. pays homage to his upbringing as well as his return to a site of turbulent change. In this exhibition, he shifts his focus to the omnipresence of civilian and police vehicles at nearly every turn of the city’s bustling landscape.
L.W.D.’s oil paintings intentionally flatten perspective so as to highlight the narrative movement in each canvas. In On the Road to SF two cars blur pass the point of recognition as they drive into the horizon, speeding pass tell-tale southern California landmarks such as the “Madonna Inn” and “Patrick Pub.” In turn, Downtown Exit depicts an aerial view of a freeway off-ramp, with each car moving towards their respective destinations. A white towering building and single blank billboard do little to solidify an exact location, yet viewers can almost certainly imagine journeying past a similar, quintessentially mundane landscape. Whether driving for pleasure or driving out of necessity, the artist demonstrates a conflicted nostalgia for metropolitan sprawl and urgency.
In Untitled a mint green vehicle, which features in a number of other works, is cornered on a sidewalk by three police cars. In two companion works, we see the same green vehicle, a personal motif, first on a large-scale billboard and then in quick pursuit by the three patrol cars. As a non-traditional triptych these moments read cinematically—an all too familiar mise en scène. Here, L.W.D. bears witness to the ramifications of both being perceived and of being incriminated. Without assigning overt values, the coy paintings in North Country demonstrate how a single observation can distort perception. When that happens, he is asking, “What would you do to survive?”
L.W.D. (b. 1957, Watts, CA), is a self-taught painter and sculptor living and working in Los Angeles, CA. This past year marked his debut at Sow and Taylor followed by another solo exhibition at Gallery SADE, both in his hometown of Los Angeles, CA. L.W.D.’s work is currently included in Invisible Luggage alongside contemporary artists such as Marina Abramović, Frank Bowling, Awol Erizku, Suzanne Jackson, Ming Smith, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Cecilia Vicuña. The exhibition, which explores themes of memory, displacement, and freedom, was curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody, Laura Dvorkin, Maynard Monrow, Zoe Lukov, and Auttrianna Wardat, and is on view at the Historic Hampton House in Miami, FL, through February 2025.
“A few months ago, I had plans to see a restoration of Frederick Wiseman’s 1979 documentary film Manoeuvre. Instead, I watched it online, connected to a TV. I was excited to see it, but the TV was “HD” and made the film look eerily contemporary, it was difficult to distance myself.
The film documents the annual North Alliance Treaty Organization (NATO)’s tactical simulation in West Germany, where soldiers participated in exercises that put them in the position of decision making for real combat. There is sometimes a light sarcasm that lingers around the communication of the participants while in these simulations—but most of the time, they are all treating it as a true matter of life or death, conquest or defeat.
Soon after seeing this film, I was catching up with L.W.D. and something struck me—didn’t he tell me he had been in the army, stationed in Germany? As it turns out, he was actually a participant in the Exercise Campaign Reforger (REturn of FORces to GERmany) put on by NATO, during the same years that Wiseman filmed his documentary. L.W.D. hadn’t heard or seen this film, he just lived it.
Some of the most sensational moments in the film are seeing the army tanks drive around the orderly German towns. The residents have to work around them, or ignore them, as they tear through the grassy hills and completely crowd the narrow roads. The tanks are actors in the true theater of war.
In L.W.D.’s paintings, the police car is a repeated motif. He paints this in mindedness of the police state. He acknowledges that cops are not always negative, but they are omnipresent. In Los Angeles, where L.W.D. and I are from, you learn to ignore the presence of the police—even though they are constantly patrolling, or chasing. I don’t want to know them, I hope to just see them pass by, and not see me. In L.W.D.’s paintings, the cops are chasing “the good guys”—the cops have decided they are doing something wrong, forcing them into trouble. We want to believe that we are the “good guy”, who will get away unscathed. Even when cornered, there's always a way out. You just have to know the right maneuvers, and be trained in the tactics of survival.”—Gabriel Garza, co-curator of North Country
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