Using text as her artistic source material, Turato records and dissects the vernacular of our current visual culture and zeitgeist by collating appropriated words, fragments, and quotes and translating them into captivating incantations that harness the essence and the nonsense of what collectively moves us.

it’s not true!!! stop lying! is Nora Turato’s first solo show with the Los Angeles gallery. The exhibition extends across both gallery floors and showcases pool 6, the artist’s latest body of work that comprises a performance and the premiere of a video work alongside new enamel panels and site-specific wall paintings. Anchoring the works and released on the occasion of the show is Turato’s sixth pool publication—the current installment of anthologies of colloquial speech and found text she compiles from a myriad of sources.

Each of the deftly designed, large-scale panels in the downstairs gallery, glossy and intensely colored, features an all-caps text that functions as an emphasized headline, along with a lowercase sentence above or below it. The slab serif typeface employed throughout all works on view was produced by Turato, in collaboration with Sam de Groot and Kia Tasbihgou, to reflect the tone of pool 6.

Echoing old-fashioned advertising signs, the enamel panels are produced in a lengthy process with several rounds of firing. The works’ inherent tension is produced between content and medium: Turato channels what is in the ether into uncanny poems on impermanence and inscribes them onto unfading, durable surfaces.

A group of wall paintings, whose near-digital precision is achieved by hand, draw the viewer further into the prevalent themes of pool 6. In a loosely H-shaped arrangement, three murals each spell out a word in white letters on a black background. In authenticity haha (2024), “haha” is splashed across the space’s central wall and paired with “authenticity” to its right. Together, they serve as commentary on our tendency to laugh off discomforting topics, as well as an acknowledgment of mythologized and manufactured authenticity.

The dark-painted wall speaking my TRUTH!!! (2024) borrows a viral phrase that suggests the notion of self-empowerment. Under the guise of becoming an “authentic” person, the expression mutates into a strong sense of subjective entitlement.

In the upstairs gallery, a video work continues to explore the relationship between language and its underlying ideology. Based on the performance, a choreography of words unfolds on a wall-sized screen and turns each term into an image, which is stylistically accompanied by Turato’s voice, rhythm and emphasis. Offering offbeat insights into the public psyche, pool 6 raises questions around self-betterment and self-governing, success and competition, the monetization of life and reality, and pseudoscience marketing. Turato’s visual and textual interplay forms a fascinating thesis on our times.

For her performance, Turato metamorphoses into a medium for several different personalities. Through intense training with a voice and dialect coach and delving deeper into the language of the body, the artist has increased her vocal range and her ability to fully embody the characters she portrays. Utilizing the parlance associated with personal transformation, Turato’s script holds a magnifying glass to the paradox of practices that are aimed at deflating the ego but instead encourage individualism and self-aggrandizing.