DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS
Sayre Gomez's epic sculpture, Oceanwide Plaza (2025-26), on view at David Kordansky Gallery. (Jeff McLane / David Kordansky Gallery)
To be a graffiti artist is to see a city through its forgotten spaces: the bits of freeway underpasses and edges of industrial buildings that might ultimately become a canvas for a tag. Early in 2024, one of those forgotten spaces was a behemoth one: the Oceanwide Plaza Development in downtown LA, a mega-development that had languished unfinished since 2019 — LA’s very own ghost tower. Over the course of days in February 2024, graffiti artists descended on the complex, turning it into a fame wall that extended over three towers standing at 25 stories or more. Practically overnight, what had once lain unacknowledged became blazingly visible.
LA artist Sayre Gomez — once a graffiti artist himself — has now recreated the entire Oceanwide complex as a sculpture, and the detail is staggering. On view as part of his solo show, Precious Moments, at the David Kordansky Gallery in Mid-Wilshire, the piece, titled Oceanwide Plaza (2025-2026), reaches a height of more than eight feet, and recreates, to scale, the minutiae of one of LA’s most infamous landmarks — from the construction detritus that was abandoned on the lower decks of the building site to the decayed tarp that hopefully advertises the development.
And, of course, there’s the dutiful recreation of the graffiti: including a mindboggling multistory tag by OTR, the cartoonish panda heads that poke out from multiple floors, and the massive roller tag by HOPES at the crown of the building — spelled HOPESS so that it fits the geometries of the architecture. (A good graffiti artist is a master of placement.)
A detail of the unfinished Oceanwide Plaza complex in downtown LA in 2024. (Carolina A. Miranda)
Gomez, who hails from Chicago and has lived in LA since arriving in 2006 to complete his graduate studies at CalArts, has long engaged urban phenomena in his work — what he describes as the “hidden-in-plain-sight kind of things.” In his paintings, he will often depict battered strip mall signage, the sun-bleached advertisements tucked into the windows of nail salons and family restaurants, and doorways plastered in old stickers.
From a distance, these look so realistic that they appear to be photos. But move in closer, and you’ll find that this photographic image is actually a painting. And that its subject may not be entirely true to life. Many of his canvases aren’t painted directly from a landscape, but are instead composites of the scenery he sees while driving around the city, along with found images. In one 2025 canvas currently on view at Kordansky, lightning strikes the Playpen strip club in downtown LA in cinematic fashion. Did he actually capture that scene? Or is he mashing together images and ideas? You’ll have to scrutinize his work closely to see what might be reality and what might be conflated image.
Sayre Gomez, Playpen, 2025. (Jeff McLane / David Kordansky Gallery)
Playing with reality is a big part of Gomez’s aim. And that instinct emerges partly from his interest in the illusions generated by Hollywood. In 2012, the artist saw the remarkable exhibition devoted to the work of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick at LACMA and was struck by the ways in which the director had used miniatures of spaceships in 2001: A Space Odyssey to generate some of the movie’s grandest scenes. These plays on reality and scale have informed the artist’s sculptural production ever since. “All of my work,” he said, during a walk-through of his show at Kordansky last week, “has a relationship to the Hollywood machine in some fashion.”
The results can be uncanny. In a 2024 exhibition at Xavier Hufkens gallery in Brussels, he presented a miniature of the Peabody Werden House in Boyle Heights, a dilapidated Victorian home that was moved from its original location with the intention of being restored — but which today sits boarded up at the corner of 1st Street and Soto. Two years prior, in a show at François Ghebaly, he presented a miniature of the Reef, the old Furnishing Mart building in Historic South-Central, a structure known for its homely proportions and its eyeball-searing LED signage. As I wrote back then, the piece offered “an anti-picturesque view of LA.”
Oceanwide Plaza at Kordansky operates in a similar vein — rendering a forthright depiction of the reckless mismanagement that governs citybuilding. Gomez is struck by the fact that Oceanwide not only occupies an invaluable location in downtown LA, but that it still stands there in its moribund state.
Sayre Gomez leads a walk-through of his show at David Kordansky. (Carolina A. Miranda)
The process of recreating this particular structure was wildly labor-intensive. Gomez began by taking drone footage of the entire complex to record the architecture and the graffiti. To fabricate the structure, he then enlisted the assistance of Hollywood miniaturist Jeff Frost, as well as designer Matthew Endler of Kludgecorp., who frequently works on sculptural fabrication for architectural offices. Once the towers had been erected, the artist and members of his studio reproduced the graffiti tag by tag.
For the most part, the sculpture is a literal recreation of the site. Though, as with all Gomez works, there are some wry additions. The artist added his tag and the names of his children, but he won’t say where on the piece they are located. As with all of his work, you’ll have to look deeply.
🏚️🏚️🏚️
Sayre Gomez, Precious Moments, is on view at David Kordansky Gallery through March 1st; davidkordanskygallery.com.
Plus, writer Jonathan Griffin has a good profile of the artist in The New York Times.
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