Join us for the opening reception of Half-Life, the 24th iteration of Garage Exchange Vienna—Los Angeles featuring works by Katrin Hornek and Brody Albert at the Mackey Apartments Garage Top Gallery.

Katrin Hornek

Katrin Hornek (1983) lives and works in Vienna. She studied Performative Art and Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Her work playfully engages with the strange paradoxes and convergences of living in the age of the geologic Anthropocene, where the effects of capitalism, colonialism, and extractivism are written into the body of the earth. Both her artistic and her curatorial practice assert an understanding of the entwinement of nature and culture, implicitly arguing for more complex formulations ­– most recently, at secession, Vienna (2024), ar/ger Kunst, Bolzano (2021), Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt (2021), the Riga Biennale (2020), Hysterical Mining at Kunsthalle Wien (2019), and I: project space, Beijing (2018).

She teaches at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Department of Site-Specific Art) and is a member of the interdisciplinary research group The Anthropocene Commons. She was awarded the Msgr. Otto Mauer Award (2021), the Studioprogram of the Federal Ministry for Arts (2020-2026), the Austrian State Scholarship for visual arts (2017) and the Theodor Körner Award (2013).

BRODY ALBERT

Brody Albert lives and works in Los Angeles. He holds an MFA from University of California, Irvine (2016), and a BFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA (2011).  Albert is the Associate Professor of Sculpture at Chaffey College and the co-director of the experimental publishing imprint, OHPAPERS. Selected exhibitions include Shapes from The Extramundane with Sara Ellen Fowler, Soldes, Los Angeles (2024), Empty Except for the Ghost, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles (2023); Wavelength, TIMES Museum, Beijing (2022),  Built In, Neutra VDL, Los Angeles (2021), We Are All Guests Here, Bridge Projects, Los Angeles (2021); Strata, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena (2018); Nonlocal, Access Gallery, Vancouver (2018); Exit Strategy with Sara Ellen Fowler, River Gallery, Los Angeles (2017); Solids, Contemporary Art Center, Irvine (2016); Open To The Public, VACANCY, Los Angeles (2016).

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The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to announce Final Projects: Group LV, exhibiting bodies of work produced by our Artists and Architects-in-Residence, Uwe Brunner, Dominic Schwab, Karl Holmqvist, Michèle Pagel, and Kris Lemsalu. Final Projects: Group LV marks the culmination of the 55th iteration of the Artists and Architects-in-Residence Program at the Mackey Apartments.

The opening reception will feature three performances by our residents:
6:00pm - Uwe Brunner and Dominic Schwab - Vapors Launch
6:30pm - Karl Holmqvist - OCEAN’S 24/7ELEVEN Reading and Book Launch
7:00pm - Mariela Gutierrez SITES performance as part of Michèle Pagel’s Cassette-Label “RatRights”

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Maya Livio, recipient of the 2024 Researcher-in-Residence, will lead a conversation with artist Huntrezz Janos and writer and researcher Emma Kemp as part of her research project “Hospes: Housing Justice and Multispecies Cohabitation at the Wildland-Urban Interface.”

In Los Angeles, a city in which questions of land use are particularly visible as sites of negotiation for human and more-than-human thriving, artists have been at the forefront of envisioning new approaches to shared livability. Offering proposals for alternative land use practices, creative practitioners have been activating local communities and devising models that reimagine what cohabitation can look like.

In this conversation, programmed and moderated by MAK Center and SOM Foundation Researcher-in-Residence Maya Livio, artist Huntrezz Janos and writer and researcher Emma Kemp will present their work. Janos will discuss ExtraTerraceTrill, a sustainable infrastructure project and prototype for an off-grid community space in LA. Kemp will introduce No Canyon Hills, a community coalition working to protect an area of the Verdugo Mountains that is under threat of luxury development. Placing these projects into dialogue, this discussion will survey the challenges and possibilities that artist-led land use projects can surface.

HUNTREZZ JANOS

Huntrezz Janos is an Afro-Hungarian artist whose work transcends dimensions but often takes form in ours as 3D interactive experiences. She is the black transgender founder of ExtraTerraceTrill, a sustainable community space currently under construction in Los Angeles, and she currently works independently as a self identified transcorporeal artificer both on and offline. Janos is a CalArts experimental animation alumni and current USC student soon to complete a Masters of Science degree in Integrated Technology, Design, and Business. She proudly creates AR, VR, 3D prints, animations, as well as architectural and automotive designs from solar power, and is widely recognized for her creative use of the virtual medium, poetry, and performance.

EMMA KEMP

Emma Kemp is a writer and researcher based in Los Angeles, working across art, ecology and cultural criticism. She is an Assistant Professor at Otis College of Art and Design, where she has taught writing and design since 2015. She holds an M.F.A. in Writing and Critical Studies from California Institute of the Arts (2014), where she is Program Coordinator of the CalArts Summer Institute. Her essays have appeared in X—TRA Journal of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Flash Art, CARLA, and others. She is the recipient of grants and awards including a Utah Humanities Fellowship, an Al Larvick National Grant, and the Ithaca New Voices literary award. Kemp is co-founder and director of Concerning Landscape, a non-profit and interdisciplinary research studio exploring ecocritical activism through their primary project, No Canyon Hills (NCH), which is working to protect a significant ecological area in LA’s Verdugo Mountains.

MAYA LIVIO

Maya Livio is a writer, media-maker, and curator whose research and practice are invested in the relationships between ecosystems and technological systems. She is Assistant Professor of Climate, Environmental Justice, Media and Communication at American University and divides her time between Los Angeles and Washington, DC. Her work has been featured in and supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, NPR, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post, among others. She has also commissioned and programmed media arts old and new as Curator of Medialive, an annual international festival at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) and the Media Archaeology Lab, a collecting institution for historical technologies. Livio is currently the Researcher-in-Residence at the MAK Center for Art & Architecture. In 2023, she was a Caltech-Huntington Art + Research Resident. She holds a PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder and MA from the University of Amsterdam.

ABOUT RESEARCHER-IN-RESIDENCE

The Researcher-in-Residence is the inaugural residency program between the SOM Foundation and the MAK Center, provides an architect, artist, or research dedicated space and time for innovative work that addresses pressing issues related to the built environment. This year’s topic seeks to explore affordable, equitable, and innovative modes of multifamily housing that respond to current and future needs.

Join us for a tour of Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village on Saturday June 1! Two tours at 10:00am and 12:30pm will be led by Preserve Bottle Village Committee board members and will guide visitors through the site, and provide the history of Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey’s life and work.

Please RSVP here and bring cash for a requested donation of $10.00 per person, which goes towards the conservation of the site.

An artist, collector, builder, writer, entertainer, caretaker, and retired factory worker, Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village is an artist-built environment of bottle-constructed houses that served as her artwork, home, and attraction for visitors in Simi Valley, CA. 

From the first structure she built to house her extensive pencil collection in 1956, Bottle Village would eventually become a collection of sixteen buildings and structures made out of bottles and other materials, almost entirely discarded items sourced from a local dump. Though damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, Bottle Village is a nationally recognized landmark and one of the few existing female built “folk art” sites worldwide. Please join us in activating the site and preserving the legacy of Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey!

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“Permanence was never the test of folk art.”

— Esther McCoy from Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village

Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey (1896–1988) began building Bottle Village in her 60s, a collection of bottle-constructed houses that became her life’s work. The site housed her extensive pencil collection, her assemblage artworks, herself, and her family. Visitors periodically visited and Prisbrey would host, give tours, sing songs, and tell stories. As an artist-built environment and Prisbrey’s home, Bottle Village is the embodiment of an evolving social sculpture. Formed in July 1979, Preserve Bottle Village Committee is a non-profit organization created to acquire and preserve the historic site when it was facing demolition after Prisbrey had to sell the site to a private developer. In the context of Prisbrey’s vision, the task of preservation becomes a question, how would she want her work to be viewed, restored, or rebuilt when she is no longer around? These imperatives become essential to providing a direction forward for Bottle Village. 

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to present a public discussion with writer, curator and art conservator, Rosa Lowinger and architectural historian and former Acting Director of Preserve Bottle Village Committee, Daniel Paul. They will discuss their individual practices in relation to the ongoing preservation of Bottle Village in the context of the exhibition Kathi Hofer and Preserve Bottle Village Committee. 

ROSA LOWINGER
Rosa Lowinger is a Cuban-born American art and architectural conservator and writer. She is the founder of RLA Conservation, LLC (www.rlaconservation.com), a practice with offices in Los Angeles and Miami. Rosa is a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation, the Association for Preservation Technology, and American Academy in Rome, where she conducted research on the history of vandalism to art and public space. Her books include: Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt: 2006) and the recently published Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair (Row House: 2023). She will be the keynote speaker at the 2024 Docomomo US Conference to be held in Miami.

DANIEL PAUL
Daniel Paul began historic preservation volunteer work at Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village 30 years ago, just one week after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. During his 15 years onsite, he coordinated with a noted rebuilding team, State Offices, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency for damage repair monies, he authored public facing materials, and in 1996, wrote the National Register of Historic Places landmark application that helped protect Bottle Village. Daniel holds a master’s degree in art history from the California State University Northridge. His master’s thesis presented the origin story of 1970s-era Late-Modern glass skin office park architecture.

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Join us for the opening reception of Kathi Hofer and Preserving Bottle Village Committee . This exhibition brings together original bottles from Tressa “Grandma” Prisbrey’s collapsed Bottle Village structures, Prisbrey’s assemblage artwork, and works by Hofer placing them in a “magic circle” at the Mackey Apartment Garage Top Gallery where the objects and artifacts relate and resemble one another (ex)changing their value and meaning.

KATHI HOFER

Kathi Hofer (b. 1981, Hallein, Austria) works conceptually across media. She is interested in forms of everyday creativity and their specific freedoms and constraints as well as in the relationship between artistic work and socio-economics. In her installations she integrates found objects, images, stories, and practices that have strongly determined the roles and values within the environments she grew up in or moves within today. In addition to her installation-based work, she has recently turned to immaterial practices and experimental forms of storytelling. In this context, she has initiated improvised encounters between actors from different cultural fields or backgrounds in public or semi-private space staging unannounced performances that took place in the absence of an audience. Of these unrehearsed, unnoticed actions photographic evidence remains that is open for further interpretation. Recent exhibitions include Continental Baths (London, UK), the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles, US), Winona (Brussels, Belgium), Tokyo Arts and Space (Tokyo, Japan), Austrian Cultural Forum (Warsaw, Poland), MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (Vienna, Austria), and mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (Vienna, Austria). Her book “Grandma” Prisbrey’s Bottle Village was published by Spector Books, Leipzig (2021).

PRESERVING BOTTLE VILLAGE COMMITTEE

Preserve Bottle Village Committee is a non-profit organization formed in July 1979 to acquire and restore the privately-owned historic property. In the intervening decades, dedicated members have been responsible for ensuring the protection of Bottle Village. The long-term objective of the organization is to allow public access on a regular basis to the fully improved and restored Bottle Village. In 2012, the organization initiated a comprehensive restoration approach for the entire one-third acre site and its historic components. For the Garage Exchange exhibition, Preserve Bottle Village Committee board member Katherine Weisman collaborated closely with Kathi Hofer, the MAK Center, and RLA retrieving and selecting artifacts.

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