Dalton Gata “The Gaze Is Downstairs” at The Sunday Painter, London

In “The Gaze is Downstairs”, Dalton Gata mines the tropes of theatre, stagecraft, and exhibition-making to illustrate the ways in which performance and artifice impact our collective idea of migration. The exhibition revolves around a reclaimed wood life-raft packed with over a range of characters, all of whom display an uncanny awareness that they are being looked at. Wooden rafts not unlike this one are commonly used by Cuban immigrants attempting the crossing to the United States mainland. In Gata’s installation, the characters aboard it are engaged in a spectacle of some sort, with dramatic poses and extravagant outfits, a chaotic aesthetic that can only result from design and focused intention.