Installation view of Garage Exchange: Double Crossings. Photography by Mark Escribano, 2012.
The second exhibition in the MAK Center’s Garage Exchange series, Double Crossings, was created by former resident Hans Schabus in collaboration with The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI). During his 2005 residency, Schabus developed Los Angeles River Crossings, a project in which he walked the entire 52-mile length of the river, mapping and documenting its more than 100 bridges. In a parallel venture, CLUI created Salt Flat Crossings, which documents Interstate 80 in northwestern Utah and the sites where it is “crossed” by drainage culverts.
Schabus’s journey was recorded on a zigzag series of Thomas Guide road maps that trace the curving path of the L.A. River. These were liberally color-coded and appended with post-it notes citing the different types of crossing structures–chiefly bridges and pipelines–their functions, and settings within the urban landscape. He also presented video documentation and an artist’s book created about the project. The CLUI project mounted photographs on a topographic landscape map, revealing a 38-mile man-made structure with neither a curve nor an exit. The raised gravel highway is occasionally crossed by salt- and mud-caked culverts, which facilitate drainage of the salt-flats landscape. CLUI also displayed video projections.
Salt Flat Crossings was presented as an obverse analog of Schabus’s Los Angeles River Crossings. The highway in the salt flats is a linear form shaped by the human need for conveyance, crossed by structures beneath it that allow for “natural” flow, through tunnels. The Los Angeles River is a “natural” linear form, spanned by human needs of conveyance that travel above it, on bridges. Together these works commented on different qualities of moving through the environment, different modes of perception, and our relationship to what was once known as the “natural world,” but is now something else entirely.
about garage exchange
In order to expand the cultural exchange at the core of the Artists and Architects-in-Residence program, The Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture and the MAK Center invite Austrian and Vienna-based alumni residents to collaborate with L.A. artists and architects of their choosing at the Garage Top at the Mackey Apartments for the Garage Exchange Vienna-Los Angeles exhibition series.
This exhibition series is made possible by The Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture.