David Alekhuogie: I made this for you

January 13 - February 23, 2023
Opening Reception: Friday, January 13, 6-8pm
Assembly, 4411 Montrose Blvd., Suite F

Assembly is pleased to present I made this for you, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist David Alekhuogie that explores the emotional dimensions of soul food in American society. With an autobiographical lens, the artist traces a personal history of food making and recipe sharing in his own family in order to reveal the storytelling and caregiving at the center of these practices.

I made this for you originates from Alekhuogie’s desire to understand the human impulse behind soul food, rather than its precise historical origins:

African American traditions are an integral part of American culinary history. Issues around race, histories of the enslaved, and colonial struggles provoke questions around who the legacy of ‘soul food’ belongs to. My question driving this work asks where soul food comes from emotionally. What is it, if not a desire to nurture, to comfort the ones you love? It’s a patchwork of the familiar. The question of authorship then becomes familial, as it’s passed down from caregiver to caregiver.

Alekhuogie’s images deconstruct iconic recipes like fried chicken and cornbread into still lifes of ingredients, staged against backdrops of vibrant, collaged fabrics. The work infuses food items and meals with the personalities, histories, and hands that animate them by depicting handwritten recipes, worn-out cookbooks, and even portraits of his family members. Alekhuogie stresses the importance of fabric as a visual metaphor by printing some of his images directly onto carefully arranged fabric compositions on canvas. Not only are these images now literally kneaded and layered as if they were part of a generations-old family recipe, but they are also embodiments of “what it means to express care through craft.”

I made this for you connects the act of cooking with artmaking to underscore the inherently iterative and collective nature of both practices. Alekhuogie recalls talking with his mother about food during difficult moments in his life: “I think of these conversations as opportunities we had to connect, to share stories and history through a language my mother is fluent in: food.” Though an intensely personal body of work, I made this for you can also act as “a guide to an American ancestral history that reveals the power of food history to build kinship among a perpetually divided nation.”

David Alekhuogie (b. 1986) is a Los Angeles-based artist who uses a multi-disciplinary practice to investigate themes of identity, memory, technology, media, and power. He began making photographs while working for various music publications, such as Complex and The Fader, and has also photographed production materials for record labels such as Warp and Stones Throw. Alekhuogie attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and minored in ethnomusicology before he moved to art-making. He holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013) and an MFA in photography from Yale University (2015). In addition to teaching and curating, his work has been in solo and group exhibitions around the country including at the Chicago Artist Coalition, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Fraenkel Gallery, and The High Museum of Art among many others.