Walead Beshty at
Regen Projects

Walead Beshty, Profit & Loss (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects. Photo: Evan Bedford.

Like a walk through Los Angeles, Walead Beshty’s Profit & Loss is dominated by advertisements targeting people at their most desperate moments. Found by Beshty on the streets, pieces of unofficial signage have been transformed into the series Bandit Sign Painting (all 2024). Their original text is stenciled in oversized lettering onto newspaper pages and layered with paint, pastel, and documents like flyers and classifieds, as in the imposing Bandit Sign Painting [WE SAVE HOMES $$$$ 323 310.9999 (Los Angeles Times, Sunday 12 May 2024; Los Angeles, California)]. Overblown in scale, layered, amplified, and obscured, these messages overwhelm us with some of the perils of 21st-century urban living, from the tiny (“TERMITES? ROACHES?”) to the life-changing (“DIVORCE & CUSTODY”) to the potentially fatal (“I BUY DIABETIC TEST STRIPS”). Like much of Beshty’s prior work, this recontextualization is concerned with the victims swept up in capitalist systems of exchange, even as they remain out of sight.

Presented alongside some smaller paintings on newsprint, two sculptural series called Smart Object and Cell Device (all 2024) are made from antennas and pagers attached to chunks of concrete, brick, tile, and cinder blocks, evoking the suspicion that monitoring devices are as pervasive to city life as predatory ads. A sense of surveillance is also present in Union Pacific Avenue (all 2021), a series of black-and-white photographs depicting RVs, tents, and other ramshackle shelters in neglected zones of Boyle Heights and Commerce. Their voyeuristic perspective and location-based titles suggest an anthropological study or police observation, a distancing measure that corresponds to the habitual dehumanization, and even criminalization, of unseen, under-housed subjects.

The exhibition goes further afield with Beshty’s cigarette paintings (all 2024), which he began in Naples after learning Italian Coast Guard crews intercepting refugees in the Mediterranean were implicated in a large-scale smuggling operation.¹ Though this context isn’t apparent, the slumped-over cigarette butts and parcels, drawn on newspaper with oil pastel, have a human pathos. The migrants they stand in for, like those living in and around the streets in Union Pacific Avenue, are people that many state officials and civilians alike would rather not see. Beshty’s works are documents of erasure, evidence of an often inscrutable globalized economy where human concerns are largely ignored. Fittingly, there are no signs of people in them at all. But while it’s true that profits for some always require losses for many, Profit & Loss doesn’t quite answer who stands to gain and who has to lose.

Walead Beshty: Profit & Loss runs from November 7–December 21, 2024 at Regen Projects (6750 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90038).

Alexander Schneider is a writer and editor currently based in Los Angeles. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.

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