The ReflectSpace Gallery, Glendale Library, Arts & Culture, and Craft Contemporary presents Tactics of Erasure and Rewriting Histories, an exhibition that highlights diverse artworks documenting acts of reclamation and removal as a process of making history. The five exhibiting artists – Fafnir Adamites, Andre Keichian, Alberto Lule, Miller Robinson, and Ryat

Yezbick – use archival and forensic materials, found objects and casting to investigate how state-sanctioned censorships create a system of oppression that impacts their sense of identity.

Their works explore the questions: What role does erasure play in informing one’s place in history? What other forms of representation can capture the fluidity of marginalized identities, the pains of inherited traumas, and the unstable truth of history?  

Alberto Lule and Ryat Yezbick use the language of power to address the inherent violence in systems that seek to divide, categorize and criminalize by instilling fear and centering on difference. Lule examines the control and manipulation of bodies in the U.S. carceral system and questions who is granted authority over the bodies of others. He creates self-portraits following systems of identification and tools used by the police on incarcerated people.

In contrast to the abundance of information in Lule’s and Yezbick’s works, Andre Keichian, Miller Robinson and Fafnir Adamites seek to give shape to histories that have been erased. Andre Keichian’s “Salt in the I” (2019) is a lyrical mapping of their family’s diasporic journey from the war-ravaged Middle East to France, Argentina and the United States through the manipulation of their family photo album.

Initially a juried exhibition at Craft Contemporary, the new iteration at

ReflectSpace expands on the original show by presenting the artworks in the context of a municipal institution, the Glendale Central Library. As a hybrid exhibition space between gallery and archive, ReflectSpace offers an interface for the artworks to exceed their roles as representational objects to become alternative forms of knowledge. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, an updated reading list, and an educational supplement.  

Reflectspace is located inside Central Library at 222 E. Harvard St. The exhibit will be on display from April 8 to May 28 with a free opening reception on Saturday, April 8 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.