David Daigle returns to Track 16 for his second solo exhibition, The Death of Beauty. The exhibition opens Saturday, July 18 with a reception from 6-9 p.m. and is on view through September 5 in East Hollywood.
David Daigle’s practice explores the intersections of desire, identity, and consumer culture through photography and sculpture. Working with found commercial imagery, he subjects technical images to acts of physical transformation that simultaneously damage and reveal them, challenging their authority, seduction, and presumed truthfulness.
Through sculptural intervention and décollage, Daigle drills into magazine pages, bus shelter advertisements, and wallpaper murals, transforming them into perforated surfaces marked by constellations of openings. Functioning as both destruction and excavation, these interventions interrupt images designed to manufacture desire, exposing the material support beneath their surfaces. The resulting holes—evoking pixels, screens, wounds, and voyeuristic apertures—destabilize assumptions about materiality, scale, and the enduring reverence for the photographic print.
“I am interested in sublimating technical images designed to generate desire. Through the subversive act of perforation, I search for the meanings trapped behind them. I want to see past the imagery, through the photograph itself and ask whether media can become so untruthful that it ultimately consumes both itself and us.”
An artist, photographer, and educator, David Daigle received a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include Trypophobic Panopticons at Track 16 (2023) and The Pink Opaque at the Broad Art Foundation (2021). Recent group exhibitions include shows at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles (2024) and M+B (2023). His work is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
