GGLA is proud to present Dormmagory, Los Angeles-based artist DL Alvarez’s premiere solo exhibition in Los Angeles and with the gallery. The exhibition’s title is an amalgamation of the Italian “Dormire”, to sleep, and the non-gender specific name Magory, meaning knowledgeable and inventive. The combination of the two suggests a kind of sleeping knowledge: an emotional, intuitive or even subconscious intelligence. Relating to this idea of the subconscious, Alvarez crafts drawings whose source imagery is pulled exclusively from textbooks and yearbooks from the latter half of the 20th Century. Stripped of context, the images become a non-linear fever dream of graphite and colored pencil on paper, exploring themes of nostalgia, togetherness, absurdity and the abject.
Alvarez began this series of drawings during the 2020 Covid lockdown, as they taught what was to be one of the last classes at the historic and now defunct San Francisco Art Institute. The students were consciously aiming to reflect the non-linear stream of events and references that was their reality, a timeline divorced of a singular order but instead fluid and disarming. Alvarez’s exhibition takes a similar approach in the way images are created, augmented and sequenced. The visions of carefree youth gathering in groups on campus yield a sense of nonchalant innocence. Yet alongside these are darker images–a pockmarked witch mask with googly eyes and an expansive brim dominates two compositions, a figure slowly emerges from a casket in a haunted house scene while in another, someone is handcuffed to the ceiling of a wooden room, the composition cutting off just above the figure’s chin shrouding the moment in this strained image that hovers between pleasure, torture and ritual.
Similar to past bodies of work in which Alvarez depicted ways in which pixelated images slowly drew into focus on the internet, the artist employs a variety of means that deter and obscure an easy read of the images chosen. In velvet-crush, a wavy barcode-like overlay envelops the forms of two languid lovers. In miniscule power struggle, a fragmented comic of a doctor using a stethoscope creeps into a portrait of a young woman–hair cascading down over their face furthering the shrouding of appearances and a simple read.
The use of yearbooks, a vehicle that instantly enshrines its content in a haze of warm nostalgia, serves as a compendium of already loaded source material for Alvarez. There is both a hyper-specificity to yearbooks, in that they reference very specific moments and inter-school dynamics to a small group of individuals, yet they also follow a set formula and are deeply relatable and understood by anyone that survived their high school years. The drawings within the exhibition also serve as an exploration of our concept of nostalgia in all of its facets. In one sense, nostalgia blankets any image with a rosy tint, yet we’re also struck with the pitfalls of this uncritical beckoning back to history as we think about the deliberately vague thesis of MAGA–which claims things were better once, without the need to specify when or for whom. In this sense, DL Alvarez’s Dormmagory is simultaneously an exploration of how we build and construct meaning through legibility, context and relation, and an investigation into the ways in which we consume imagery and process it both consciously and subconsciously, as individuals, groups, and a collective society.