Mathilda LaZelle and Kayla Tange
Play Me
February 14th - March 7th, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 14th, 7-10 pm
Frieze-week Bendix Building Reception: Thursday, February 26th 5-7pm
Persons Unknown is pleased to present Play Me, opening February 14th. Referencing arcade logic, seductive interfaces, and reward systems, Play Me frames desire as something to be navigated, earned, dispensed. Viewers encounter a choreography of control that mirrors the games we cannot opt out of—where attention functions as currency and intimacy is structured by design. Mathilda LaZelle’s sculptural joystick operates as both symbol and interface, navigating femme commodification and digital dissociation, while Kayla Tange positions the audience beneath a watching body, emphasizing asymmetries of power and sustained observation. By invitation and command, Play Me reclaims control from the circuits that commodify pleasure, turning the performer, the watcher, and the machine into co-conspirators in the act of touch.
Working primarily in video, performance and new-media, Mathilda LaZelle’s multidisciplinary practice is a strip-tease between unsettling intimacy and extrapolative critique. In a somatic fathoming of glitch, she wrangles with the contemporary crisis of scale through glittering absurdity and a porosity of selfhood, navigating themes of perception, value, and connection. Mathilda’s work has been featured by institutions across the country including: Wassaic Project, The Torrance Art Museum, the deYoung Museum and many alternative locations.
Kayla Tange (b. South Korea) is a Los Angeles–based multidisciplinary artist working in video, installation, sculpture, and performance. Drawing on archives, found materials, and text, her work explores belonging, displacement, and embodied memory. Under the persona Coco Ono, she uses dark humor and satire to examine spectatorship, labor, and bodily autonomy. Her work has been supported by the California Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, AHL Korean Foundation, and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC Libraries.