GGLA | GOD’S BUSY. CAN I HELP YOU?

Willbert Olivar and Lalo Avila

May 31st - June 28th

GGLA is pleased to announce God’s busy, can I help you?, a collaborative exhibition by Los Angeles-based artists Willbert Olivar and Lalo Avila. Marking nearly a decade of shared artistic practice, the exhibition brings together a new body of work that includes oil and airbrushed paintings, bronze sculptures, and a short film. Together, the works explore contemporary experiences of fear, dread, and displacement, examining how horror is encoded in both everyday objects and the built environment.

Working in a sustained dialogic process, Olivar and Avila trade works between their respective studios—layering, reworking, and responding to each other’s gestures. This method yields a hybrid visual language in which symbols accrue meaning through repetition, contradiction, and collaboration. The exhibition’s title, God’s busy, can I help you?, reflects this ethos: a sardonic invocation of spiritual absence paired with a grounded gesture of peer-to-peer support.

While the iconography of the exhibition initially evokes familiar horror tropes—black cats, jack-o’-lanterns, skeletal figures—closer inspection reveals a deeper engagement with infrastructural violence and social memory. In Under Construction #1, a shaped panel painting features a weathered traffic cone airbrushed in safety orange and marked with a LADWP logo. Partially obscured by a whimsical sticker of a cat and pumpkin, the object subtly references the agency’s culpability in events such as the Altadena fire, where negligence has had real-world consequences.

Elsewhere, a recurring motif of the “Snooty Fox Motor Inn”—a kitsch landmark in South Central Los Angeles—appears across several works. For the artists, the motel functions as both a personal site of nostalgia and a quiet monument to urban persistence. Its continued presence in 2025 becomes a symbol of resistance to gentrification and cultural erasure—forces far more insidious than any supernatural threat.

In the exhibition’s sculptural centerpiece, a pair of cast bronze jack-o’-lanterns gleam with a mirror-polished finish. Created using the labor-intensive lost wax casting process, the sculptures elevate a mass-produced seasonal object to the status of classical monument. Inspired by a childhood incident in which Olivar was ridiculed by religious neighbors for Halloween decorations, the pumpkins bear a subtle relief of The Last Supper on their reverse—collapsing sacred iconography and childhood memory into a single, ironic gesture.

In an adjacent section of the exhibition, a portable 8-inch DVD player presents a looping video work composed of found and original footage. Drawing from a range of horror films set in Los Angeles—compilation is intercut with newly filmed material by the artists. Shot in first person, the camera navigates a shadowy forest at the city’s margins, where the viewer encounters a series of bronze sculptures by the artist duo. These gleaming jack-o’-lantern forms—at once playful and uncanny—appear animated by a spectral force, their presence migrating from screen to gallery.

With God’s busy, can I help you?, Olivar and Avila offer a nuanced meditation on how horror operates—quietly, structurally, and often under the guise of the familiar. The works oscillate between sincerity and satire, drawing power from a shared language forged through friendship, place, and persistence.

Willbert Olivar & Lalo Avila, IRBING, Galzed Porcelain, 4 x 4 x 4in, $500