2:49 PMClaude responded: L.L.W.D: Downtown Babylon presents paintings and raw wood sculptures made by an artist who began painting in 2019 after thirty years of incarceration, paying tribute to his upbringing in Watts, Torrance, Gardena, and Compton. The paintings offer a surveillance-eye view of the city — no sky, high-rises and cars contorting within the canvas, white cars curling across dark tarmac like fragments of humanity. At the exhibition's center, sculptures built from driftwood gathered after the Los Angeles fires stand as urban maquettes: ancient Babylon washed ashore, wood weathered and scarred, holding the memory of homes and lives lost. For L.W.D, the car is simultaneously proud community identity and the means of police incursion — Babylon a city with no horizon where joy and violence are forced to coexist.
