There is a building in downtown Los Angeles that never became what it was supposed to be. Oceanwide Plaza was conceived as a glittering mixed-use development — luxury condominiums, a hotel, retail space — three towers rising above South Figueroa Street that would add another layer of gleaming ambition to the city’s ever-evolving skyline. Then the money ran out. The real estate developer behind the project defaulted on its loans, construction halted, and the towers were left standing as raw concrete husks, skeletal and unfinished, presiding over the southern edge of downtown like monuments to interrupted dreams.
What happened next was pure Los Angeles. Graffiti writers and street artists discovered the towers. One by one, then in waves, they climbed the scaffolding and the exposed floors and covered the concrete in tags, murals, and abstract explosions of color. By the time the wider public took notice, the unfinished skyscrapers had been transformed into one of the most striking accidental graffiti canvases in recent memory — a vertical, improvised gallery that said something profound about this city, about who fills a vacuum when capital retreats, about whose art gets made and where and why.
It is exactly this tension — between the formal and the improvised, the monumental and the marginal, the official city and the city that persists beneath and around it — that animates the work of Los Angeles artist Sayer Gomez. And nowhere is that more evident than in Previous Moments, his current exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery, on view through March 1.
The centerpiece of the show is a meticulously crafted architectural scale model of the Oceanwide Plaza towers, rendered in extraordinary detail and covered, as the actual buildings were, in tiny, painstakingly recreated graffiti tags. The effect is immediately striking: here is an object that belongs to the tradition of architectural models — those pristine miniatures that sit in developers’ lobbies suggesting order, mastery, and futurity — except this one is tagged from base to crown. It is both document and transformation, a monument to a monument, a miniature that somehow contains the full weight of what it represents.
The work collapses several histories simultaneously. There is the history of Los Angeles real estate, with all its cycles of speculation, collapse, and reinvention. There is the history of graffiti as both subcultural practice and contested art form, a tradition with deep roots in communities across the city. And there is the history of the architectural model itself as an object — a genre of representation that has always been about power, about who gets to imagine and build the future.
By bringing these histories together in miniature, Gomez does something quietly radical. He elevates the graffiti to the same plane as the architecture. The tags are not defacement here; they are the building’s true completion, its meaning. The developers imagined towers of glass and luxury; the artists who climbed them imagined something else entirely. Gomez’s model holds both things at once, sustaining the contradiction rather than resolving it.
This kind of formal and conceptual precision is characteristic of Gomez’s practice more broadly. He is an artist deeply embedded in Los Angeles — not as backdrop or subject matter, but as a system of forces and relationships that his work actively thinks through. His paintings, sculptures, and installations engage with the city’s geography, its infrastructure, its social textures, and its particular quality of light with an intelligence that resists easy categorization.
His work feels attuned to how Los Angeles looks from a remove — compositions that suggest the grid of streets, the shimmer of heat off asphalt, the strange beauty of the basin’s spread seen from the hills. He is interested in how the city looks, but more fundamentally in how it works: how space is organized, who has access to it, how it gets marked and claimed and transformed over time.
There is also in Gomez’s work a persistent interest in surfaces. Los Angeles is a city of surfaces — of facades, of screens, of the flat horizontal plane of the basin. His paintings treat the canvas as a kind of urban surface, a thing to be layered and marked and built up over time, not unlike the walls that have absorbed decades of the city’s visual language.
Previous Moments situates the Oceanwide Plaza model within a broader body of work, and the conversation between pieces is illuminating. Paintings and smaller sculptures surround the centerpiece, each approaching the city from a different angle, each asking different questions about what Los Angeles is and what it means to make art here.
What emerges is a portrait of an artist for whom the city is not just a location but a methodology. Gomez does not merely depict Los Angeles; he thinks like it — laterally, improvisationally, with an eye for the gap between what a place is supposed to be and what it actually becomes.
That gap is everywhere in this work. It is in the unfinished towers that became an accidental cathedral of graffiti. It is in the architectural model that honors unofficial art while using the tools of official planning. It is in paintings that find beauty in infrastructure, that see the grid of the city as something worthy of sustained aesthetic attention.
Los Angeles has always attracted artists who take the city seriously as a subject — from Ed Ruscha’s deadpan surveys of its commercial vernacular to Lauren Halsey’s visionary work rooted in South Central. Sayer Gomez belongs in that lineage. He is making work that only this city could produce, about questions that only this city asks.
Sayer Gomez: Previous Moments is on view at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, through March 1.
