Nikita Gale is a Los Angeles–based artist who was raised throughout the United States in a military family. Gale’s practice is structured by long-term obsessions with specific objects, or classes of objects, and how they gesture toward highly specific social and political histories. Gale uses ubiquitous consumer technologies as frameworks to consider how individuals potentially reproduce their relationships to objects within their relationships to psychic space and political, social, and economic systems. Relying on a background in anthropology and archaeology, Gale focuses on objects of cultural significance and the conditions that shaped their making, particularly those associated with protest, rock music, and postwar industrial architecture.

In EXTENDED PLAY (2018), a shelf of electric guitars embody the inherently rebellious nature of rock music while also symbolizing the amplification of intuitive touch. Gale’s installations employ sculptural works as well as performative and sound elements in order to provide an immersive investigation into how biological and mechanical repetition work together as agents of transformation and protest.