LACMA

not ordinarily give even a first thought. When he goes to art events, such as exhibition openings, Garay sometimes brings a vendor's pushcart stocked with frozen paletas in the shape of Aztec pictograms and gang members' hand gestures as if they were materialized words—words made flesh. Given to all who ask, these paletas embody a play on the Eucharist. Garay uses a nom d'art—Alla—to sign his works and "tag" other surfaces. Allá (pronounced ai-YAH) is a Spanish word meaning "there," or more accurately "over there"—across the street, beyond the mountains, over the border, someplace other, somewhere else. It also has connotations, particularly when used to describe a person's character or attitudes, of "out there"—strange, outré, alien to conventional behavior or thought. Garay willingly courts the nuances and innuendos that this "name" connotes. He is also aware that the written name can suggest (especially to English or non-Spanish- speaking readers) Allah, which provokes other significations— again, a phenomenon that Garay encourages so as to under- mine one's confidence in the presumed clarity and certitude of language. In Garay's art, the very notion of certain or correct meaning is confounded by multiple language plays and ambiguous perception, always as if speaking in tongues. — HOWARD N. FOX There is a faintly metaphysical or suprarational dimension to Gary Garay's art, a kind of ecstatic reverie hinted at in the incantational description (courtesy of his friend Jose Luis Moctezuma) on his website: "Between the logo and the script, an image resists classification—a photograph, a letter, un paletero [a popsicle vendor]: objects without precedent in the gleaming loneliness that is hyper-culture. Set against this iridescent sadness, the devil's hollow jeer and the laborer's sublime figure, the holy mother smiling benignly beneath folds of dried skin and calluses at the resignation she never called her own." The text is all but inscrutable, but its parlance suggests that Garay's art is in a state of ecstasy, speaking in tongues in which ambiguous yet important messages may be embedded. Sometime around 2004, Garay was driving from Los Angeles to Victorville, a town in California's Mojave Desert, when he noticed an abandoned house —actually, a crudely built one-room shack—next to a roadside restaurant where he had stopped. Curious, he stepped in and discovered that the shanty contained the belongings of its previous resident—furniture, clothes, letters, snapshots—all of which appeared to have been undisturbed for a long time. Garay left, but the forlorn site haunted him, and several months later he returned to find everything still untouched, just as he left it—and just as it had been, since the mid-1990s. With some research and much intuition, Garay was able to imaginatively recon- struct the stranger's life. He never tried to track down the stranger or to find his next of kin, yet he did take some personal and symbolic responsibility to "receive" and in some measure to preserve the memory of his existence through a series of paintings, drawings, writings, and objects that relate his apperception of the stranger. Garay does not conceive of his gesture as a forensic or clinical exercise to establish precise facts and an exacting history of an individual; rather, he sees his represen- tation as iconic and emblematic of a lived life. This body of work "speaks in tongues" to affirm a respect for human existence. Garay also creates art objects that are surrogates or simulacra for real ones, such as a pair of Nike shoes—with the style name "Cortez"—constructed entirely out of corrugated cardboard and packaged in actual shoeboxes, or a telephonic pager that happens to be several feet tall. Recasting familiar objects as inauthentic ones compels beholders to rethink them, to give second thought to objects to which we might 157 GARY GARAY

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