November 10, 2019 / December 29, 2019 – LOS ANGELES

Over the Influence is pleased to present Camofleur, a solo presentation of new works by Reko Rennie in the Garey Gallery opening on November 9, 2019 alongside Shepard Fairey’s exhibition Facing the Giant: 3 Decades of Dissent. Born in Melbourne in 1974, Reko Rennie is an Indigenous Australian interdisciplinary artist who explores personal and political narratives through the lens of his own Aboriginal (Kamilaroi/Gamilaroi) heritage and broader cultural themes around power, identity, memory and history. Self-taught, Rennie’s works are largely autobiographical, often combining the iconography of his Kamilaroi heritage and stylistic elements of graffiti with contemporary media that includes painting, sculpture, installation and filmmaking. Rennie has built up a distinctive visual language that merges traditional diamond-shaped designs, hand-drawn symbols, camouflage and repetitive patterning to subvert romantic ideologies of Aboriginal identity. Camouflage exploits the vulnerability of visual perception and its subjective relationship with meaning. It usually attempts to render the visible invisible by disorienting the viewer’s eyes. Rennie plays with layers of camouflage and patterning to amplify, rather than conceal, his identity and to stake a claim to cultural visibility.