Tiger Strikes Asteroid LA
1206 Maple Ave
Suite 523, 5th Floor
Los Angeles CA, 90015
1pm-2pm PST
Please join curator Nanette Orly and artist Dana Davenport for a special walkthrough of Dana Davenport: one hundred days.
Dana Davenport’s new solo exhibition explores the significance of domestic spaces and the intricate elements and narratives that contribute to the creation of a home. This collection of sculptural works transforms ordinary domestic objects—including chandeliers, windows, and family photos—into powerful symbols of affirmation, guardianship, and protection, reflecting Davenport’s personal journey of establishing a home for her new family.
Box Braid Chandeliers are a sculptural series crafted from synthetic braids, hair beads, and accessories sourced from local beauty supply stores, which are often owned by Korean Americans while servicing Black and Brown communities. These chandeliers serve as a proxy for her own body, reflecting on her experience navigating two cultural identities. The Window series, a photo collage-based work, combines personal family photos with found imagery from African beauty advertisements to photographs of everyday life in Korea during the 1900s. These collages are encased in wooden frames featuring Korean architectural motifs, creating a geometric pattern that simultaneously unifies and divides the images. Davenport’s sculptural works intricately explore the intersections of her cultural identities and their role in defining a sense of self for herself and future generations.
Dana Davenport is a Korean and Black American interdisciplinary artist shifting between installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Within her practice, she addresses the complexities that surround interminority conflict as a foundation for envisioning her own and the collective futurity of Black and Asian peoples. Davenport utilizes synthetic hair as a proxy for her body to discuss the strained relationship between Black and Asian peoples, specifically in America. As a product overwhelmingly sold by Koreans to Black Americans, she considers the implications of the material as it sits on the beauty supply shelf and how it is activated in the hands of Black folks through love and labor.
Nanette Orly is the Curator of Active Cultures, and is based in Los Angeles. Nanette was previously Senior Curator at Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) in Australia, where she curated the award-winning exhibition SIMMER (2021), BOUND (2022), and the National Photography Prize (2024). She also led MAMA’s Radical Book Club over four years and served as Chairperson of Runway Journal and board member of un Projects, two independent arts publishing platforms. In 2024, she completed a curatorial fellowship at the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and curated her first international exhibition, between the lines, at Openspace Bae in Busan, South Korea. She holds a Master of Curating and Cultural Leadership from UNSW Art & Design in Sydney.
Tiger Strikes Asteroid is a non-profit network of independently programmed, artist-run exhibition spaces with locations in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Greenville, SC. Our goal is to collectively bring people together, expand connections and create community through artist-initiated exhibitions, projects, and curatorial opportunities. We seek to build an ethos of cooperative achievement in the visual arts, creating the physical and emotional space for artists to show their work and exchange ideas on their own terms. Our artist-run model expands the artist’s role beyond that of studio practitioner to include the roles of curator, critic, and community developer and provides an alternate model to the conventions of the current commercial art market.