LEFTOVERS: David Horvitz & Sophia Le Fraga at Gene’s Dispensary

By Yezi Lou Jan 27th, 2026

In LEFTOVERS, David Horvitz and Sophia Le Fraga bring together a fragmented textual aesthetic and a nuanced engagement with language that extends beyond conventional modes of conceptual visual presentation. Alongside their individual practices, the exhibition introduces a collaborative project that allows intangible thoughts to settle into concrete, visible forms, generating a sense of directedness of acting upon something rather than merely contemplating it.

David Horvitz and Sophia Le Fraga, LEFTOVERS. Exhibition view at Gene’s Dispensary, Los Angeles, 2026. Courtesy of the artists and Gene’s Dispensary. Photography by Josh Schaedel.

Upon entering the space, my attention followed the crowd toward a central wall covered with loosely ordered prints. Black and gold recur across overlapping patterns, lines, and dots. Titled First Come, First Served, the project developed from the artists’ shared inquiry into objects and poetry, these works utilize synthetic meats, spam and sausage, which the artists dipped in sumi ink to repeat the physical act of printing. The installation rejects rigid insistence: unframed sheets stretch from ceiling to floor, their lower edges intermittently revealed as visitors move, opening brief glimpses between bodies. The effect recalls a horizontally oriented kitchen table—domestic, labor-intensive, and saturated with a repetition charged by invisible effort. After the exhibition’s close, these prints will be mailed to some of the audience who attended the opening, extending the work through a reciprocal gesture of exchange and circulation.

David Horvitz Sophia Le Fraga, First Come, First Served, sumi ink on paper, dimensions variable, 2025. Installation view at Gene’s Dispensary, Los Angeles, 2026. Courtesy of the artists and Gene’s Dispensary. Photography by Josh Schaedel.

I first encountered Le Fraga’s work in a group exhibition where she presented a showbiz light embedded with recomposed text. In LEFTOVERS, she continues this investigation into language as a sensory residue. The scent of poetry follows Le Fraga wherever she goes, leaving traces on ordinary objects. This is perhaps most evident in her collection of school library cards, marked by her drawings and handwritten notes after she acquired those objects once handled but never owned. These gestures foreground the temperature of physical touch and temporality; within Le Fraga’s work, material presence is always entangled with duration and the inevitable erosion of time. Intimacy circulates here—passed along, briefly held, and preserved.

Sophia Le Fraga, I Think I Will Hospital, LIVE MAS, Pia’s Journey, found library card, 3 x 5 inches, 2025. Installation view at Gene’s Dispensary, Los Angeles, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Gene’s Dispensary. Photography by Josh Schaedel.

“We both love poetry, and we meet almost every week in our garden—well, David’s garden,” Le Fraga laughs, describing the friendship underpinning the collaboration. Horvitz’s work, however, resists easy categorization, carrying an ineffable tenderness. In LEFTOVERS, Horvitz presents a photographic sequence derived from a found black-and-white Super 8 film of the late conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, depicting a man riding a bicycle into the ocean. Horvitz anonymously uploaded the video to YouTube in 2006, where it accumulated thousands of views before being removed following a complaint by the gallery representing Ader’s estate. Horvitz later re-uploaded the video under a slight alteration and produced archival prints from the frames. The work enacts a complex circulation of authenticity, transmission, and the infinite process of re-recording.

It is often said that we have entered an age dominated by image-reading. Yet, such reading becomes increasingly complex amid the constant reorientation of our attention. When the video was translated into a series of photographs, the work continued to expand despite its contested provenance. In an era when information circulates instantaneously and often without verification, such dissemination leaves lasting imprints, shaping a new collective consciousness.

David Horvitz, Newly Found Bas Jan Ader Film, 2006/2021, archival print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta, 6.75 x 9 inches, 2006/2021. Courtesy of the artist and Gene’s Dispensary. Photography by Josh Schaedel.

Ultimately, Le Fraga and Horvitz challenge the static assumptions of reading. Their works offer an interwoven view of personal instinct and public circulation, opening a space where language is no longer burdened by forced clarity, but allowed to exist in the "blanks" and discontinuities of information saturation. This practice mirrors two intertwined impulses of human nature: the search for safety and the drive toward risk. We see this tension in the works themselves—the safe, repetitive domesticity of the kitchen-table prints balanced against the archival risk of the "stolen" footage. The poetic act of defamiliarization becomes a negotiated space: a compromise between our attraction to the familiar trace of a hand and the unfamiliar, shifting currents of global dissemination. Yet the question still remains for us: what is left, and what is over?

Left: David Horvitz, Untitled (Douglas Huebler), framed sheet of paper, 30x40 inches, 2025.
Right: Sophia Le Fraga, A P AUSE, acrylic, wood, vinyl lettering, light bulb, 22x8 inches, 2025.
Installation view at Gene’s Dispensary, Los Angeles, 2026. Courtesy of the artists and Gene’s Dispensary. Photography by Josh Schaedel.
 

LEFTOVERS runs from Jan 10 – Feb 14, at Gene’s Dispensary (422 ORD STREET, 2B, LOS ANGELES, CA 90012)