Bahamian-American artist April Bey spent a year trying to date and find romantic love in the United States, treating the search as fieldwork. The result is her second solo exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles, “All the Reasons We Never Tell Someone We Love Them…They’re Worthless”, which opened on 31 October and runs through 19 December.

The show grows out of Bey’s ongoing Atlantica project, in which she imagines herself as an alien reporting from Earth to her home planet. Approached that way, courtship becomes a study in strange human behaviour: yearning treated as weakness, affection demolished by strategy, intimacy existing alongside avoidance, and the illusion that another romantic possibility is always waiting just beyond the current one.

Many of the portraits began during a residency and exhibition in Memphis with TONE Gallery and curator Jayla Slater, including a public photoshoot in Orange Mound — founded in 1890 as the first residential community for Black homeowners — on 31 October 2024. Participants, particularly queer sitters, were photographed, pampered and celebrated, and left as collectors of Bey’s work.

The centrepiece is a large three-panel tapestry in which Black men dressed in vivid pink western wear grow out of a tropical landscape, celebrating queer intimacy and companionship. For the first time, Bey also turns the lens on herself, making self-portraits that examine desire, self-worth and emotional availability. Two monumental wall installations built from 128 pillows dwarf the viewer, while blunt personal revelations are painted across lush surfaces in thick impasto — one asks, “Who holds me when I stop holding everyone?” The show ultimately asks what remains when the fantasy of finding someone else stops organising the story.