Square Hole, Round Peg
November 4 – November 27

Michael Henry Hayden
Anthony Lepore

Michael Henry Hayden and Anthony Lepore will present new work made in collaboration. The artists bring each of their distinct sensibilities to this exhibition in sculptures that play on their shared interests in plants, animals and domestic life. This is the third presentation of Hayden and Lepore’s collaborations, having previously shown work at 356 Mission and The Finley Gallery, both in Los Angeles 

Michael Henry Hayden lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from University of Southern California, his BFA from Cooper Union in New York and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His most recent solo exhibition at ACME, in Los Angeles was a critical success and his work has been in several notable group exhibitions including; BAD BOYS BAIL BONDS ADOPT A HIGHWAY at Team Gallery, New York, curated by Amanda Ross-Ho and Low at Lyles & King Gallery, New York

Michael Henry Hayden’s work in painting and sculpture explores the boundaries between image and object. These works often investigate moments of local light and texture in plants and surfaces drawn from the artist’s immediate surroundings. A recent series of relief sculptures recreated the artist’s door, each one identical, but painted to simulate the shadows cast by objects within and out of the frame at various times of day. These three-dimensional paintings hover between states of domestic anxiety and cinematic bliss.

Anthony Lepore grew up in Los Angeles and received his MFA from Yale University and BFA from Fordham University. He has had solo exhibitions at the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside, two Los Angeles contemporary art galleries M+B and Francois Ghebaly, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City in addition to others. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Galerie Xippas in Paris, and the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art to highlight a few.

For the past few years, Anthony Lepore has been making photographs in a studio he built inside a working bikini factory. Founded by his grandfather in 1970, the factory is emblematic of the rise and fall of manufacturing in greater Los Angeles. Additionally, it is the site where a uniquely Californian ideal of beauty has been fabricated. Lepore has been making photographs inspired by the gap between that invention and the reality of the working environment. Creating compositions with materials of the site, colorful lycra, spaghetti strap, and tools from the factory floor, Lepore suggests the realization of fantasy and illusion, while staying rooted in a context of the mundane and routine labor that enables such fantasies.