Surveying one hundred tow sign paintings produced over the past several years, 100 Tows offers a comprehensive look at Ayala’s ongoing Tow Sign series. Meticulously airbrushed, these works recreate the “Unauthorized Vehicles Will Be Towed” signs found throughout Los Angeles parking lots. Rendered with industrial precision, the paintings often read as printed objects, collapsing the distance between image and material.
Ayala is known for isolating these signs as quiet instruments of regulation embedded in the urban landscape. By replacing standard language with personal names, neighborhoods, studio information, and references drawn from Chicano visual traditions, the works transform bureaucratic warnings into intimate records of place and identity. Across the series, the signs function as a form of pseudo portraiture, tracing relationships, labor, and the lived experience of navigating a city shaped by constant monitoring.
Collected here for the first time, the one hundred works accumulate into a layered archive. Read together, they reveal repetition and subtle variation, charting how authority, memory, and authorship circulate through everyday visual language.
Published by Highway Liaison, Los Angeles
Text by Ted Gerike
Hardcover with slipcase, 215 pages, English, 2026
