L.W.D

Silke Lindner is pleased to present the first New York solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist L.W.D (aka Little Walt Dog). L.W.D first began painting in 2019, after thirty years of incarceration. In this body of work, Downtown Babylon, the artist pays tribute to his upbringing in Watts, Torrance, Gardena, and Compton – reconciling experiences of injustice with nostalgia, state control with resistance.

There is no sky in Downtown Babylon. The city is surveilled from above, like news footage of a car chase, or cells glimpsed beneath a microscope. High-rise apartment blocks and cars contort themselves within the canvas, jostling to avoid slipping out of the frame. White cars are drawn in curling lines of oil-stick, drifting across dark slicks of tarmac like fragments of humanity itself. They clog the roads at odd angles, their drivers unseen, destinations uncertain. The series folds together the idea of second chances, multiple lives, crossroads, and decisions: responsibility and consequence. Brightly colored cars burst from the urban sprawl like a self-analysis unfolding across the canvas, where the only true freedom within confinement becomes imagination, thought, and dream. Downtown Babylon is buzzing, even under the eye of the police.

At the center of this body of work is a series of raw wood sculptures: a kind of urban maquette built from driftwood gathered in the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires, as though fragments of ancient Babylon have washed ashore. The wood reveals its own history: weathered, scarred, pierced by nails and traces of former structures, holding within it the memory of homes, lives, and what was lost. Cars made up of cylinders and polygons carry the warmth of a child’s plaything, even as their roads run to dead ends. Nothing is permanent, and from tragedy and ruin, L.W.D continuously attempts to rebuild meaning.

This tension – between discovery and surveillance, play and danger, the freedom of the open road and the claustrophobia of the chase – runs throughout L.W.D’s work. For the artist, the car is simultaneously a proud expression of identity and community, and the means of police incursion. Recurring motifs of windows and cars are reminders of human presence; architectural proxies for people, caught in systems not of their own making. In Rastafari belief, Babylon is the exploitative capitalist order that oppresses and extracts — the structure that divides and subjugates the African diaspora. In L.W.D’s work, it is a city with no horizon, a collection of fragments, where joy and violence are forced to coexist.

L.W.D. (Little Walt Dog) was born in 1957 in Watts, CA. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He has had solo exhibitions at The Ruffed Grouse Gallery, Narrowsburg, NY (2025); Nationale, Portland, OR (2025); Sade, Los Angeles, CA (2024); and Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles, CA (2024). His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Kimball Art Center, Park City, UT (2025) and the Historic Hampton House, Miami, FL (2024).