April Bey All the Reasons We Never Tell Someone We Love Them...They’re Worthless

October 31 — December 19, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 31, 4 – 6 pm

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present All the Reasons We Never Tell Someone We Love Them… They’re Worthless, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Bahamian-American artist April Bey.

The exhibition emerges from Bey’s yearlong absurd attempt to date and find romantic love in the United States. Approaching “courting” with the observational curiosity of an alien attempting to understand human behavior on Earth, Bey collected stories, experiences, encounters, and observations along the way. What begins as a humorous investigation of dating, desire, avoidance, sex, and companionship becomes a reckoning with the ways people give, receive, misunderstand, withhold, and lose LOVE.

Bey’s ongoing Atlantica project imagines the artist as an alien reporting from Earth back to her home planet. Dating becomes particularly fertile territory. Yearning gets treated as weakness and affection demolished by strategy. Intimacy exists slapped right alongside avoidance. The illusion of romantic possibilities existing in perpetuity throughout the universe can make us behave as though another potential is always waiting just beyond the current one.

The exhibition expands this search into different forms of connection. Friends, animals, community, lovers and the Self become portals through which intimacy is negotiated.

Many portraits originate from Bey’s artist residency and subsequent exhibition in Memphis with TONE Gallery and curator Jayla Slater. During the residency, Bey held a public photoshoot in Orange Mound on October 31st, 2024. Established in 1890 as the first residential community for Black homeowners, Orange Mound carries a history of Black ownership and community. Bey’s photoshoots invite fellow Atlanticans, particularly queer participants, to be photographed, pampered, celebrated and archived within her visual universe. Participants also leave as collectors of Bey’s work, becoming part of both the creation and ownership of the cultural objects their images produce.

In the large-scale three-panel tapestry The Secrets We Keep, All the Reasons We Never Tell Someone We Love Them… They’re Worthless, Black men dressed in vivid pink Western wear grow out of a sexy tropical landscape. The work celebrates queer intimacy and companionship while staging its subjects in deep, sometimes maddening relationships with themselves. Bey refuses to treat self-love as the consolation prize after romantic failure. The relationship with oneself is allowed to be consuming, erotic, frustrating and worthy of attention.

For the first time in her career, Bey also turns the lens toward herself. Until this body of work, she had never made a self-portrait. These works examine boundaries, desire, self-worth and what it means to remain emotionally available while becoming increasingly certain about what one will and will not accept.

The exhibition also includes two monumental wall installations constructed from 128 pillows, with a scale that dwarfs the viewer and surfaces defined by softness, plushness and excess.

In Don’t Ask My Opinion on Shit, ‘Cause to Make You Feel Good About Yourself is Exhaustin’, Bey disrupts the lush images with harsh personal revelations painted directly across their surfaces in bold, thick impasto. One asks, “Who holds me when I stop holding everyone?” turning a private question into something almost meme-like: a collective recognition of the labor of holding everyone else together.

All the Reasons We Never Tell Someone We Love Them… They’re Worthless, asks what remains when the fantasy of finding someone else stops organizing the story, and whether searching for romantic love might reveal the many relationships already sustaining us.

*The Artist requests your most festive garb.

*Exhibition text developed collaboratively by the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.