About the Exhibition.

TMR is pleased to present Christopher Myers: Nobody is My Name—the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and the first project of TMR’s 2019-2020 curatorial cycle—Histories of a Vanishing Present. This curatorial cycle explores, through postmemory, how a generation of artists born at the cusp of the global turn inherit pasts that don’t directly belong to them. For these artists, identity is not bound solely to biology, history, or geography, but rather sited in situationally specific processes of negotiation. Nobody is My Name approaches this complex approach to identity building through the experience of travel, foregrounding the ways in which a sense of self is assembled—at times smoothly, at times disjointedly—from interactions with people and places around the world.  For years, Myers has been committed to transforming our understanding of globalization and the multiple realities it creates. At the core of his practice is an interest in capturing the ways the global project is intimately interwoven into quotidian acts and spaces—highlighting how the inherently abstract dimensions of the global are embodied amongst peoples. The exhibition features different projects that highlight unique moments, histories, and contexts, from a sculptural and photographic tribute to African-American sideshow performers, to a collaboration with traditional shadow puppet makers in Jogjakarta, to an Odyssey-inspired monumental quilt banner created with weavers in Egypt. From these kaleidoscopic exchanges, what emerges is a distributed subjectivity defined not by a single idealized origin, but by the cycle of its own making and unmaking.  Through his practice, Myers proposes a way of interacting with the world based not on where we are from, but on all the places we have been and might go.