Installation view of Final Projects: Group XLI - We Only Went to NASA Together. Photography by Joshua White, 2016.
Bucharest-based artists Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan understood the Southern California landscape as currently and historically an extension of the military imagination, connecting disparate points to look back to their home along the NATO frontier. For their Final Projects installation in the Mackey Garage Top, Benera and Estefan presented a three-part installation using Google maps, military surplus materials, historic imagery, and a diagram of the ‘political equator.’
Vienna-based artist Thea Moeller‘s sculptural practice involves reworking industrial and post-consumer materials into unexpectedly well-fitting inhabitants of space. She had thus far produced two different installations-one at the artist-run gallery in Venice 6114, and the other on the roof of an artists’ studio in the downtown Fashion District–each invading their respective, existing orders. In her unit at the Mackey Apartments, Moeller repeated the process, replacing the muted aluminum furnishings with her sculptures and altering the experience of the famed architecture.
Berlin-based architect Daniel Springer read L.A.’s architecture and built environment through the imaginations that shaped the city and the fictitious potential of existing physical space. His video installation Artifacts of the 20th Century played with perceptions of moving through the landscape of Los Angeles until it began to feel like a work of fiction. A closer look at the postmodern architecture of the Bonaventure Hotel was also shown, as a case study for the blurring of fictitious and real space that Springer advocates.
Vienna-based artist Kerstin von Gabain‘s work during her residency was about car culture in Southern California. She developed a series of paintings that she made while driving throughout the city, the titles of which reflect her experiences on the street and also portray the parallels between the two activities. Accompanying the paintings was a video showing the artist at work, and the installation as a whole gives one the sense that all artists in Los Angeles must, at some point, produce work in their car.
This exhibition was made possible by the Austrian Federal Chancellery.