She was still wrapping up her photography MFA from Yale in 2014 when the wider art world first learned of Genevieve Gaignard, and a lot has happened in the last five years. For one thing, she established her studio in Los Angeles and instantly became one of the most intriguing and acclaimed new voices in our city's fine art firmament. Significant solo exhibitions began unfolding at a rapid pace ? at Shulamit Nazarian and the California African American Museum, as well as major efforts in Houston, New York, New Orleans, Paris, Chicago and more, including a recent exhibition at her new gallery home of Vielmetter Los Angeles. (If you're catching this soon enough, I'm Sorry I Never Told You That You're Beautiful is open in downtown through August 24.)

What explains this meteoric rise? For starters, there's an undeniable cool factor about Gaginard herself ? a breezy street glam realness, rigorously clear understanding of her own intellectual intentions, genuine humor and a deep level of empathy for the hidden figures that machinate this moment in social history. Her influences include but are not limited to Arthur Jafa, Beyonc?, Nina Simone, Kahlil Joseph, and the wallpaper in her childhood home. But ultimately the power and appeal of her work in photographic self-portraiture and sculptural assemblage has its foundation in the most urgent aspects of this time in history.

Working at the intersection of race, gender, identity, memory, and popular culture, Gaignard's work tackles broad social dynamics through the intimate lens of personal experience. As a mixed-race woman, she was and remains deeply affected by a feeling of invisible in-betweenness, and has been motivated by the desire to explore, explicate, and extrapolate from her own experiences some larger truths about the American experiment.?

The work is still very much rooted in the personal, Gaignard tells the?Weekly, and I don't think I'll ever quite shake that narrative. The topics of race, gender and class come with a lot of baggage and there isn't one person that is not affected by all three.? ?

She routinely combines originally produced self-portraits in which she costumes herself as eclectic archetypes of women from her life, history books, and around the way, with elaborate walk-in domestic settings decorated with objects and ephemera culled from thrift stores and her own vivid memories. These actions she sees as part of a whole, be it adorning herself or engineering an environment. I make what I feel needs to be made and the form it takes, whether that's a photograph or a collage or an installation, works itself out. I like to refer to my installations as psychological spaces. I create domestic spaces that feel familiar at first, but when you take the time to think about each object in relation to the things around it, their meaning becomes elevated and charged.?

Genevievegaignard.com

vielmetter.com/artists/genevieve-gaignard