Michael Bala at
Overduin & Co.

Michael Bala, Eye Comfort (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Overduin & Co. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Entering a museum of ancient cultures, you’ll encounter rimless plates, mosaic shards, column fragments: objects that once structured daily life, now fractured and reframed as artifacts. Their incompleteness does something their original wholeness could not: It activates the imagination, inviting us to reconstruct a fuller vision of a now-vanished world. Michael Bala’s Eye Comfort, on view at Overduin & Co., transposes this phenomenon into a contemporary context. By assembling modern architectural remnants and infrastructural detritus into sculptures and reliefs, Bala reframes utilitarian materials as obsolete artifacts, inviting us to see the present through an imagined archaeology and prompting reflection on how quickly an object can slip from utility to ornament, movement to stasis. 

Eye Comfort is titled after a 1920s lighting system designed to conceal lightbulbs behind decorative fixtures, prioritizing atmosphere over illumination.¹ Bala extends this notion of comfort as a form of control—curating perception to manipulate mood—into the aesthetic realm, severing his materials from their intended functions. In The Rain (Plaid of Shadows) (all works 2024), an oak baluster fragment is crowned with a slightly open umbrella and inset with a partially obscured clock. The assemblage evokes yet another frustrated form—that of a standing lamp—while denying its practical use. These elements blend the warmth of craftsmanship with a haunting sense of stuckness. The ticking clock and frozen umbrella suggest time, movement, and protection, yet remain locked in an unfulfilled, eternal stasis.

An artifact emerges when an object’s utility is disrupted, whether by breakage, fragmentation, or fragility, transforming it from functional to ornamental. This tension between frustrated utility and ornament appears in Jewelry Box (2nd Floor), where circular balustrades create a structure that is both protective and exclusionary. Meanwhile, A.M Echoes (Mezzanine) combines hardwood flooring, a curved oak handrail, and globes embedded into its balustrades. Emblematic of power and commerce, the globes are reduced to mere ornamental supports for the overall structure. This tension between utility and ornamentation reveals the fragility of our bond with everyday objects, showing how swiftly the tools of the present are to become the artifacts of the past.

Twirl, Twirl, Twirl (Gold of Shadows), one of the more striking wall works in the exhibition, is a vertical wooden slab embedded with pennies, disrupting the familiarity of currency. The coins’ edges jut out from the surface like abstract geometries: Each penny is evenly spaced as if frozen in a deliberate, ritualistic pattern. This transformation of materials—balusters into sculpture, pennies into ornament—underscores Bala’s central premise: That the objects we use, misuse, and overlook will one day be ossified, removed from circulation, and represented instead as precious traces of a bygone era.

Michael Bala: Eye Comfort runs from November 15, 2024–January 11, 2025 at Overduin & Co. (6693 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90028).

Isabella Miller lives and works in Los Angeles.

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