nativemanson is the artist’s first major exhibition in Los Angeles, marking his representation by Sprüth Magers, in the city where Jafa has built his career as a filmmaker and artist. The exhibition highlights the range of his practice through recent wall works, sculptures and moving images, including his latest film, BG (2024).

The first work visitors encounter in the exhibition, BG seamlessly blends shots from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver—specifically its culminating, gut-wrenching brothel shootout—with re-edited and newly filmed passages that manipulate the original movie’s image and sound. In Jafa’s hands, Taxi Driver’s protagonist, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), moves through a sequence of killings of Black pimps and johns, rather than the white characters that appear in Scorsese’s film, in hopes of “rescuing” the preteen Iris (Jodie Foster).

This reworking, which unfolds in layered, unrelenting repetitions over the course of an hour, brings to life the original version of Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver script, in which those killed were written as Black. It also intersperses new scenes of the African American pimp, Scar (Jerrel O’Neal), murmuring and lost in thought, set to a looping phrase from Stevie Wonder’s love anthem “As.” BG thus makes explicit the racial animus that filters through Taxi Driver, as seen through Bickle’s antisocial, violent white lens, while also creating space for Black self-possession.

Like a clock or a metronome, SloPEX’s stills move from one to the next, ticking time click by click: historical images, portraits of musicians and other cultural figures, artworks, and photographs of space and microbes; as well as the recurring forms of Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat and other animated creatures, along with humans clad in masks, face paint and sunglasses that seem to echo the characters’ features.

The projections of SloPEX and Dirty Tesla are mirrored in the reflective black walls of Picture Unit (Structures) II (2024), an architectural passageway that translates Jafa’s assemblage impulse into three dimensions.

As viewers enter the maze-like structure, they are met with a gruesome crime scene photo of Sharon Tate—calling to mind the wordplay in the exhibition’s title, nativemanson—and views of other celebrities who found both incredible heights and tragic ends. Though each image is expressive in its own right, Jafa’s selections tease out overlapping themes and narratives of artistic and personal freedoms, concretized in part through the repeated image of the motorcycle. Exuding their metallic, industrial power—and their ever-present risk and danger—bikes appear on set with experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, with the rebel characters of Easy Rider, and in the hands of Oakland’s East Bay Dragons Motorcycle Club.

A motorcycle and bicycle frames also feature in Jafa’s new large-scale sculpture composed of metal rails (engineered by the artist), an array of pipes and weathered blue tarp. Untitled (2024) stages these hard and soft elements along the wall in a way that evokes a drawing in space, using the materials’ natural inclinations to stretch, bend and hang, while also coaxing them into unexpected configurations. Jafa’s sculpture nods to Minimalism yet through his own maximalist lens of varied textures and layered references.

Other wall-based works in nativemanson attest to Jafa’s inventive use of diverse mediums. Untitled_Grid, Sprüth Magers (2024) explodes his image bank across an entire wall, creating clusters of meaning that center Black life amid the backdrop of twentieth and twenty-first-century cultural touchstones. Like notes in a musical composition, Jafa’s original photographs mingle with appropriated images, posters and artwork, each presented in an artist-designed frame reminiscent of his industrial rails.

In paintings such as Blue Silence (2024), Jafa’s punctuated use of found images takes a new form; connected by passages of thick black brushstrokes and impasto are a worn, halo-like cover of Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way (a portrait shot by photographer Lee Friedlander) opposite the cover of LeRoi Jones’ book Blues People and part of a “Xenomorph” head from the movie Alien, originally conceived from designs by the artist H. R. Giger.

Epic Fail, like all works in nativemanson and throughout Jafa’s growing oeuvre, emphasizes his virtuosic use of associative meaning, whether through collected images or his own staged interventions. Bold and revelatory in their depiction of Black cultural production, Jafa’s works across various media continue to drive conversations in contemporary art today.