Lola Gayle

I am a Downtown Los Angeles–based interdisciplinary artist working across visual art, music, and performance. My visual practice explores identity, memory, ancestry, displacement, spirituality, and the body as a site where personal and inherited histories accumulate.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jamaican parents and relocated to California at seven, I grew up between cultures and histories. I describe this experience as “diasporic-transplantation”—the West Indian journey of being uprooted, transplanted, adapting, and continually reconstructing a sense of self. For me, diaspora is not only a geographical experience; it is something carried in the body.

My relationship to visual art began unexpectedly through being represented in the work of other artists. My image has been captured by photographers and incorporated into the work of artists, including video artist Bill Viola. One of the most formative experiences was being commissioned by Viola to portray a contemporary Madonna and Child with my newborn son for a video installation at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Being transformed into an artistic and symbolic image led me to question what it means to inhabit an image created by someone else—and ultimately compelled me to reclaim my own image.

I began creating visual work during a break from performing with my music project, MiLO. Without formal visual-art training, I began manipulating a photograph of my face covered by a colorful mask created by my then-seven-year-old daughter. I cut, layered, obscured, distorted, and reconstructed the image, discovering that the process itself became a language for understanding identity.

My works combine photography, digital manipulation, photographic transparencies, large-scale canvas, acrylic and watercolor paint, paper collage, and hand-sculpted paint. I move between digital and physical processes, allowing the image to degrade, fracture, accumulate, and transform. The recognizable face becomes partially concealed, fragmented, or reassembled.

I think of these works as narratives of our “imperfect assemblage” as humans. Cut and paste is how we feel as people. We are made from ancestry, memory, relationships, wounds, culture, spirituality, and experience. Some pieces seem incompatible, yet they remain connected. The forces that appear capable of destroying us can also become the very materials through which we survive.

My visual language is dark, visceral, layered, and spiritually charged. I am interested in the tension between concealment and revelation, permanence and decay, belonging and displacement. Through fragmentation, I explore how identity can remain intact while continually changing.

My music and performance practice inform this work by keeping the body at its center. Whether through voice, image, or physical presence, I am interested in what the body remembers, what it carries, and what it refuses to forget.