Majestic

2024

Majestic at the Shanghai based Vanguard gallery, featured works created especially for this show, delving into humanity’s enduring fascination with fate, using symbolic imagery and immersive environments to question our relationship with chance and control. This marks Lester’s first major solo exhibition with the gallery.

Sitting in the middle of the exhibition hall is “The Bait”, an installation that continuously emits an intriguing noise, greeting the audiences with a thrill of uncertainty. The sound comes from lottery balls printed with koi fish, tumbling inside a transparent container as if swimming in a shoal, evoking both tension and anticipation. In “Lucky Skies”, Gabriel Lester extends his ‘zero-cinematic’ exploration which he began with “How to Act (1999)”, where he only used spotlights, an empty stage and film soundtracks to generate the cinematic experience. The two low-resolution LED screens processing and resolving picture frames back to pixel spots, and intervene in any attempt to predict symbolic hints from the celestial bodies depicted in the video.

The site-specific installation “Augur” features crystal balls engraved with faint auspicious clouds, scattered across the floor, reflecting light in a soft glow. Further into the exhibition hall, “Return” presents a series of industrial conveyor installed on the wall that adhered model trees, figurines, and architectural scale models. The looping scenery suggests the repetitive nature of life, but with an optimistic touch, as new perspectives emerge in the process of circulation. In “Clear Romance”, close-up shots of vintage lottery tickets from various countries capture a single piece of paper hovering in the air, carrying the weight of a ritual meant to manifest luck and fortune—universal desires shared by humanity. Signifiers in artworks spreading through the exhibition hall, staging a luring scene that unsettling audiences’ rational believe in odds and the randomness of the universe.