Rele, Los Angeles is proud to present Process + Place, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Terrick Gutierrez and Ayobami Ogungbe. Drawing from distinct geographies and lived experiences, both artists delve into the layered relationships between memory, architecture, and the emotional resonance of place. While Gutierrez and Ogungbe come from different cultural contexts within the African Diaspora, their work shares a deep interest in how identity, domestic life, and the emotional weight of place are carried through material and memory.
The exhibition continues a transcontinental dialogue—bridging geographies to reveal the contrasts and common threads in how communities across the Diaspora hold space for history, home, and healing.
Terrick Gutierrez, based in Los Angeles, manipulates traditional and nontraditional materials to build dreamlike architectural compositions. As a child of Belizean and Mexican immigrants, his work explores urban life through the lens of a rapidly changing built environment, such as liquor stores, public housing projects, and other cultural and physical landscapes. Gutierrez strategically employs color to interrogate personal and collective histories, particularly those shaped by race, identity, and migration. Gutierrez reclaims these spaces through vivid colors and textured surfaces, foregrounding the cultural richness of the communities that inhabit them.
Ayobami Ogungbe, based in Lagos, Nigeria, integrates photography, collage, and the meticulous act of hand-weaving to construct multilayered compositions that engage with memory. His practice mines familial archives and intimate environments, collapsing time and perspective to highlight the psychological complexities embedded within domestic space. For this body of work, Ogungbe utilizes black-and-white imagery - the grey tones within his work function metaphorically. By presenting his work as a visual meditation on personal memory, Ogungbe invites viewers to consider how we construct ourselves over time.
Process + Place is an invitation to consider how the environments we live in, both physical and emotional, shape who we are.Through acts of construction, deconstruction, and reassembly, Gutierrez and Ogungbe craft spatial narratives that preserve personal histories while imagining new ways to dwell, remember, and connect. They remind us that ‘we’ as artists, communities, and viewers are the active preservationists of cultural memory.