Von Lintel Gallery | Los Angeles

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to announce Miles Regis: Just Like Us, the artists third solo exhibition with the gallery. The following essay was written by Shana Nys Dambrot.

Miles Regis: Just Like Us

Miles Regis is a prolific and multifaceted talent, with an expansive practice that reaches across fine art, fashion design, social activism, music, and technology. But the foundation of his signature style is his vibrant, gestural, and materially witty mixed media technique, incorporating textile collage into complex, opulent, majestic, and emotionally charged portrait paintings. Using acrylic, oil, and spray paint alongside the fabric, wallpaper, paper, leather, and sequins, Regis achieves painterly, gestural moments within the compositions, often adding text to gently amplify and direct attention towards his messages.

With perennial influences from his childhood in Trinidad ranging from masquerade culture to matriarchal power, ancestral guidance, and the unsinkability of a joyful community, Regis engages contemporary issues of racial and social justice from his point of view as a Black immigrant in America. This topicality gained urgency during the 2020 movement for racial justice and remains as resonant as ever in the present political climate. But true to his roots, Regis has chosen once again to meet the perilous moment with poetry, reframing an era of ugliness and division as an opportunity to rediscover the beauty of life and our shared humanity. It’s not accidental that Regis has chosen collage as the primary directive for this work, as it is quite literally built from pieces of everything, sourced from around the world and across generations, and forged by empathetic attention into a whole greater than the sum of these parts. This work not only depicts humans, it is made the same way we are made — by gathering and remembering the pieces of all that came before us, making each of us both unique and interconnected.

In Just Like Us, Regis offers a collection of individual and group portraits in which young people and mature women stand firm in their power or delight in friendship — each one a character study of a loved one, a public figure (yes, that is Kamala Harris in Unity - We Not Going Back), or an ancestral spirit close to the artist’s heart. Furthermore, his elaboration on the exquisite potential of the collage dynamic yields almost magical results — rendering a spectrum of skin tones and a topographical embodiment of amazing hair styles with metonymic fabrics and a wry humor. For example, the use of black patent leather as skin in the tableau Respect Yourself, the queenly crown of locks on Bohemian Girl that even Beyonce would envy, and the winsome fall of blonde braids on the white girl ally, bless her, in 70's Movie Poster (Live, Love, Feel, Vote!). The exhibition’s eponymous title piece forms a kind of cornerstone for the whole collection, containing examples of every single one of his techniques, materials, mediums, and characters — with women and queer folk lovingly centered, like a class photo of the coolest generation ever.

—Shana Nys Dambrot
Los Angeles, 2024

Miles Regis has work in public collections such as the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History, the Californian African American Museum, the North Dakota Art Museum, the Intel Corporation and other notable private collections such as The Bunker Art Space, Halle Berry, Mariah Carey, Spike Lee and Russell Westbrook to name a few. Regis lives and works in Los Angeles.

For additional information or visual material please contact the gallery by email at gallery@vonlintel.com.