The red-and-white checkered picnic blanket spread taut and affixed to the wall with wood and barbed wire sets the scene for the backroom encounters that KING COBRA puts on display in Heathens, where visitors are met with an array of gimp masks fashioned from pink silicon. 

The opening for Lauren Halsey’s sister dreamer was a party, a street fair with booths for local food, games, and music, to be exact. And walking down the middle of the street on that bright and sunny Los Angeles day, one could feel the ways that sister dreamer realized Halsey’s long held ambitions for her work to speak to members of her community, rather than to speak about them.

Thomas J Price’s Within the Folds (Dialogue 1) (2025) is not quite the first sculpture that greets viewers in the gallery, but it is the tallest. With Resilience of Scale, Price has assembled five of his immense bronzes—three women and two men, each a Black person, unconcerned in their own way with the world around them. These bronzes are immediately striking not only for their size, but also for their casual attire and relaxed postures. Composites of figures who one might glimpse on the street, they call to mind the quotidian textures of Blackness.

What first looks like a moody expanse of chocolate and burnt umber with hints of green and rose gold gives way, upon closer inspection, to a set of underlying patterns. At evenly spaced intervals, lighter shades of mauve produce long narrow islands snaking their way from the bottom to the top of the painting. Looking closer still, one can find a few partial pale horizontal fragments of lines.

David-Jeremiah asks viewers to feel the emotional drama of what it is to be a spectacle. Ultimately in I Drive Thee, he is the “I” in the exhibition, serving as our navigator through this fraught terrain.