From “instant pictures” to “rapidraw” systems, the items crowding the architect’s desk from the mid-century reflected a preoccupation with speed and efficiency. With a flourishing of supplies and materials that transformed the work of many in the graphic fields, this was a period in which architects engaged widely with technologies of printing and printmaking. Whether in the service of the distribution of working drawings, or in the making of carefully stamped lithographic multiples, architects worked to make their architecture print ready.

Through a selection of 12 case studies, Print Ready Drawings highlights these miniature paper landscapes. Across their surfaces are expressions of control: annotation marks, enlargement instructions, manufacturer tags, and watermarks, along with evidence of any number of unacknowledged contributors.

Drawings in this exhibition are viewed as microcosms of the material world, and their convergence in each document tells a social and production history of architectural work. Their organization into technical affinities produces curious pairings, like Lina Bo Bardi and Roger Katan, whose magazine cover designs constitute parallel case studies of contextual and material appropriation. Other groupings include scientific illustrator Gloria Brown Simmons, Eames Office, and Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas.

Print Ready Drawings also includes a variety of production ephemera, technical manuals, and samples, alongside artist’s films that turned the camera inward towards the process itself, including Richard Serra’s Color-Aid film. Several drawings featured in the exhibition, considered too fragile to be exhibited, are replicated through a process of material and technical research in conservation labs, manufacturing workshops, eBay, and oral histories. This research is documented in films made by Julie Riley and Jenny Leavitt that interpret and translate historical materials and modes of making.

The site of architectural authorship has long been found in drawings. By anonymizing the technical and foregrounding original marks and signatures, drawings played a crucial role in prioritizing cognitive acts over material labor — thus obscuring their intersection. This exhibition examines the architectural drawing as the arena of architectural work—the mundane, the repetitive, and the documents that convey how architects navigate the borders between private work and what is destined to be public.

Print Ready Drawings is curated by Sarah Hearne, with curatorial assistance by Arianna Borromeo and support from the MAK Center exhibitions team Seymour Polatin, Exhibitions and Programs Manager and Brian Taylor, Curatorial Assistant. The exhibition features commissioned films by Julie Riley and Jenny Leavitt. Exhibition design is by Current Interests with conservation support from Paradise Framing. Graphic design is by Christina Huang.

Installation images: Joshua Schaedel

Print Ready Drawings was made possible, in part, with generous support from the Getty Foundation’s Paper Project Series. Additional support was provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the University of Colorado Denver, College of Architecture and Planning.

There is something growing in the gallery. 

Nine years ago, Christian Kosmas Mayer planted a palm tree in the courtyard of the Mackey Apartments as part of MAK Center’s Artists and Architects-in-Residence Program. The residency ended and moved on to the subsequent groups of residents, but the palm tree remained, under the care of the institution, where it remains today.

In this exhibition, Christian Kosmas Mayer, joined by Los Angeles-based artist Gala Porras-Kim, revisits this living sculpture for an in-depth exploration of the functions and roles of the art institution. Both Mayer and Porras-Kim utilize the exhibition space as a site to foster discourse and critique how art institutions exercise forms of care within collecting practices. The MAK Center is a unique context as it is a non-collecting exhibition space, but it preserves and cares for three R. M. Schindler designed properties in Los Angeles. In this sense, the exhibition spaces are the collection.

This unique relationship between exhibition space and care practice forms the basis of and yet you grow. Porras-Kim's Forecasting Signal is a site-activated sculpture that extracts ambient water from the gallery environment and filters it through a hanging burlap sheet saturated with graphite, extended from the ceiling. As the water accumulates, it drips through the material onto a panel where it makes an image. This process occurs repeatedly through the duration of the exhibition, and turns the exhibition space itself into what could be considered a process-based drawing. 

In dialogue with Forecasting Signal is Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, which also utilizes the environmental conditions of the space, introducing spores from the British Museum storage onto muslin fabric, encased within an acrylic shell. Over the course of the exhibition, a mold grows from these spores and becomes increasingly visible. While the spores originate from the British Museum, an institution with a long and fraught history of collecting practices, the mold grows in the exhibition at the MAK Center’s Mackey Apartment Garage Top Gallery, raising questions about the interconnectedness of art institutions.

Along with the palm tree, Mayer brings another tree into this exhibition, a sapling he grew in 2016 from the acorn of a majestic oak tree that lives in the yard of a small family house in Los Angeles’s Koreatown. This oak, one of the renowned 'Olympic Oaks' presented to all gold medal winners at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, was planted by African American high jump champion Cornelius Johnson upon his return home. Over time, the historical significance of this tree was lost until Mayer uncovered this hidden history through his research. 

Over the course of two years, Mayer worked in collaboration with the MAK Center and the California African American Museum for the preservation of this tree, resulting in its designation as a Historic Cultural Monument by the City of Los Angeles in 2022. However, despite this achievement, the destiny of the Olympic oak remains uncertain as the tree has declined in health due to neglect from a new property owner. Now, the young potted oak included in this exhibition, may soon be the solitary living ancestor to this historic legacy. 

In and yet you grow, Mayer and Porras-Kim work to reposition the roles of the artist as life givers, and question the traditional role of the curator as collection caretaker safeguarding inanimate objects. Both of these works by Porras-Kim have been exhibited before in other institutions, but each retain a site specificity based on the environmental conditions in which they are shown. Complementing these pieces, Mayer’s site-specific interventions continue his investigation of institutional responsibility and break down the traditional roles of artist practice, curatorship, and architectural intervention. In the context of the palm tree, which now has become a part of the Mackey Apartments, Mayer inverts the Modern critique of museums being places where art dies, and situates the art institution as a site for continued life. In this exhibition, the MAK Center becomes a nursery—birthing, feeding, and parenting artworks with a life of their own. 

ABOUT GARAGE EXCHANGE

Garage Exchange Vienna—Los Angeles seeks to foster relationships, conversations and collaborations in the arts between Los Angeles and Austria. In order to expand the cultural exchange at the core of the Artists and Architects-in-Residence program, the Austrian Federal Chancellery 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.

Artists

Christian kosmas mayer

Christian Kosmas Mayer (b. 1976, Sigmaringen, Germany) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. His work produces and preserves a constellation of narratives about historical remains and representations that are often on the verge of disappearing, or have already been rendered imperceptible. Mayer’s projects, which are the outcome of extensive artistic research and close collaborations with specialists across various disciplines, transform the minor, forgotten, and obsolescent into material artifacts, discursive objects, multi-media installations, and performances. Linking technology to memory and care, his practice explores the methods by which important issues can be approached in conceptually and aesthetically surprising ways: techniques of reversal, of compressing and stretching time, of looking at things from both ends at once. 

He has had solo exhibitions at Vienna’s mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria ; Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria; Austrian Cultural Forum New York, USA; MAK Center, Los Angeles, USA; University Gallery of the Custody, Dresden, Germany; Zamek Culture Center, Poznan, Poland; Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, Germany; Austrian Cultural Forum Warsaw, Poland; Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin, Germany; Galerie Mezzanin, Geneva, Switzerland and participated in biennales and group exhibitions such as the 26th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil; Manifesta 7, Rovereto, Italy; Vienna Biennale 2019, Austria; Biennale Gherdëina 2016, Italy; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany; Marta Herford, Germany; Leopoldmuseum, Vienna, Austria; Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles, USA; ZKM I Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria; Secession, Vienna, Austria; and numerous other venues.

Gala Porras-Kim

Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984, Bogotá) lives and works in Los Angeles and London. Her work is about the social and political contexts that influence how intangible things, such as sounds, language and history, have been framed through the fields of linguistics, history and conservation. The work considers the way institutions shape inherited codes and forms and conversely, how objects can shape the contexts in which they are placed. 

Porras-Kim received an MFA from CalArts and an MA in Latin American Studies from UCLA. She has had solo exhibitions at Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City, The Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville, Kadist, Amant Foundation, Gasworks, London, and CAMSTL, and upcoming at Leeum Museum of Art and MMCA, Seoul, MCA Denver, and Carnegie Museum of Art. Her work has been included in the Whitney Biennial and Ural Industrial Biennial (2019), and Gwangju and Sao Paulo Biennales (2021) and Liverpool Biennial (2023). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019), the artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-22), and currently a fellow at Museo delle Civiltà in Rome.

This exhibition series is made possible by The Austrian Federal Chancellery.

Installation images: Tag Christof.

Plastic, Plastic, Plastic
Text by Angella d’Avignon

“The German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht hated the Westside. He hated Hollywood, the only part of Los Angeles he seemed to be familiar with. When he arrived in 1941, Santa Monica was flat while he lived there—nothing but manicured lawns and oil derricks in dust fields.

The Mackey Apartments are replicated* at Disney World in Florida to signify a modern California apartment—the platonic ideal of apartments, landmarked as classic Los Angeles architecture although they were built in the last eighty or so years. The idea that California held the dream of the mythic West itself in its "empty" landscape, that acreage could ensure legacy, that private property meant success. These precious places built by eccentrics and exiles, polished apartments made for one specific person, sit empty most of the time, while renters drift in and out of sublets and single family studios. These interiors hold other people's boring day to day existences, hovering together anachronistic in the psychic space of a room.

In Los Angeles, you can tell the time of the month by the amount of furniture on the sidewalk—entire sofa sets, wayward mattresses, coffee tables and glass cabinets. Recognizable objects from one's interior is a kind of body horror—I once spotted a stack of metallic plastic cups I'd bought for my first apartment in my twenties from a store I thought was expensive. No one else had party cups like mine at the time, yet here they are on someone else's stairs, outside someone else's apartment that looks replicable, like it could be anywhere in suburban Southern California.

The word polymer means ‘of many parts,’ and polymers are made of long chains of molecules. Polymers abound in nature. Cellulose, the material that makes up the cell walls of plants, is a common natural polymer. Synthetic polymers are made up of long chains of atoms, arranged in repeating units, often much longer than natural ones. The length of these chains, and the patterns in which they are arrayed, make polymers strong, lightweight, and flexible. In other words, it’s what makes them so plastic.

Plastic ensured that human manufacturing would never be limited by the resources offered by the natural world. Roland Barthes called plastic ‘miraculous,’ writing that ‘plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation,’ since any substance—ivory, tortoiseshell, glass—could be made from plastic. Barthes continues, ‘The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas.’ The 21st century world is saran wrapped: by 2050, the ocean will be more plastic than water.

While plastic wooed the mid-century U.S, long-chains of houses proliferated across Brecht's hellish flat fields, entire neighborhoods sprouting up like manicured weeds, filling with mass manufactured domestic housewares made in consumer-grade plastic, taunting the poet's former presence in Los Angeles, after he fled again for his native Germany after 15 years of exile in the U.S. during World War II. Layers of layers of daily life held forth in these houses and apartments, each one haunting the next generation while the plastic utensils, hair combs, high chairs, bed pans, and party cups outlive every vision of utopia that anyone's had about Los Angeles since. 

The narrative of transience is scaled by class. The burdens of precarity and desire meet in the well-appointed interiors whose objects' total value will never outweigh the endlessly unaffordable exterior in which they're housed. We are not the objects we consume but rather the paths we tread through spaces anonymous to anyone who treads them in our absence.”

* While the Prime Time Cafe at Disney World’s Hollywood Studios is not an exact replica of the Mackey Apartments, the Imagineers used it as inspiration to construct a general set of modern California apartments representing idealized mid-century living.

This exhibition series is made possible by The Austrian Federal Chancellery.

Installation images: Josh Schaedel.

Commissioned photography and video by artists Adam Wiseman, Lake Verea, Onnis Luque, Sonia Madrigal, and Zara Pfeifer veer from the documentary conceit of architectural photography toward the subjective. This work is decidedly interpretive, seeking out the many narratives contained within parks, markets, collective housing, malls, and bureaucratic buildings. Zohn, a Jewish emigree who fled Vienna during World War II at the age of 8, dedicated his career to creating a modern Guadalajara. Through these photographs—acts of investigation and translation—we find glimpses of his utopian desire amidst the chaos, beauty, and violence of everyday life. 

Seeking Zohn is the first presentation of Zohn’s architecture in Los Angeles. The transposition of his work to L.A. places it in dialogue with R.M. Schindler’s designs. As both architects are Jewish émigrés, a parallel exists between the Austrian-Mexican and the Austrian-Angeleno’s experiences. The installation at the MAK Center creates a resonant triangulation between three cities: Vienna, Guadalajara, and Los Angeles. Billboards placed in the garden navigate between the urban scale of Zohn’s buildings and the intimacy of the Schindler House. Household objects designed by Studio Fabien Cappello and fabricated by artisans in Guadalajara build a bridge between the civic and domestic realms.

As a practitioner, Zohn is a lesser-known figure outside of Mexico, and his work has yet to be widely published or exhibited in the United States. A generation after fellow Guadalajara-born architect Luis Barragán and Mexican-Spanish architect Félix Candela, much of Zohn’s architecture aligns with late modernism, a period that’s recently come under re-evaluation. With this consideration comes an expansion of the conventional parallels drawn between Los Angeles and Mexico, which often focuses on designs and actors associated with midcentury modernism. While Zohn’s early career shows the influence of Candela’s thin-shell concrete arches, which he called “cascarones,” his later designs are marked by expressive structural gestures, forming a singular geometric vocabulary that carries from project to project and a sensitivity to the social conditions of the urban fabric. 

Notable projects in Seeking Zohn include his most famous building, Mercado Libertad­–San Juan de Dios (1958-9), an indoor public market first proposed as his thesis project; the bandshell Concha Acústica (1958) in Parque Agua Azul; Unidad Deportiva Adolfo López Mateos (1956-59) sports center; the mall and parking garage Edificio Mulbar (1973-74); CTM-Atemajac (1977-79), a collective housing project; and one of his final works, Archivo del Estado de Jalisco (1985-91), a state office building and archive. Artists were each assigned a site for photographic inquiry, and the results suggest an architecture bound to the stories and conditions of an evolving city. These works are accompanied by select images, publications, and artifacts from Zohn’s archive, courtesy of his daughter, Diana Zohn Cevallos. 

Artists

onnis luque, mexico city

Onnis Luque is an architectural photographer who studied architecture at The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). His work has been published in various magazines such as Domus, Arquine, MONU, Architectural Digest, and PLOT and has been included in several architectural biennials and competitions. His book, USF / DF Appropriation Tactics (CONACULTA / Ediciones Acapulco 2014), documents several years of photographing the Santa Fe Housing Unit in his native home of Mexico City.

Adam Wiseman, Mexico City/London

Adam Wiseman (Mexico City 1970) is a graduate of the International Center of Photography in New York and a former printer at Magnum Photos. His relationship to photojournalism has marked his distinctive career. Wiseman’s subjects are interposed with his understanding of image as something between document and intersubjectivity. He is a Senior Lecturer at the University of East London and divides his time between Mexico City and London, giving lectures and workshops while developing new work.

Lake Verea, Mexico City

Lake Verea is an artist duet formed in 2005 by Francisca Rivero-Lake and Carla Verea. Their work explores concepts of expanded photography through installation, textile, performance, sculpture, and video. By experimenting with photographic techniques and formats that blur questions of authorship, they build narratives that highlight their combined identity to create intimate portraits of architecture, artists’ archives, and people. They’ve poured through the archives of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, architect Luis Barragán, and German émigrés Josef and Anni Albers, amongst others. Lake Verea’s 2011-2018 “Paparazza Moderna” project explores the idea of architecture as a living being through portraits of single-family houses designed by modernist architects Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Richard Neutra, Rudolph M. Schindler, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Philip Johnson.

sonia madrigal, mexico

Sonia Madrigal lives and works in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl. Her work explores different visual narratives that reflect on personal and collective concepts of gender, the body, violence, and territory, with a locational focus on the East Metropolitan Zone of Mexico City. She is part of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte/National System of Art Creators (FONCA). In 2018, she participated in the XVIII Biennial of Photography of the Centro de la Imagen. She was awarded a residency at the Encuentro de Colectivos de Geografía Crítica y Geografías Autónomas (Ecuador, 2019). Madrigal has participated in exhibitions across Latin America, Europe, and the US and published her work in Harper's, Aperture, and The Guardian.

zara pfeifer

Zara Pfeifer is an artist based in Vienna and Berlin whose work is concerned with the social phenomena of large-scale infrastructure. Her documentation of the modernist housing project Alterlaa (“Du, meine konkrete Utopie,” 2013-17) and her series on truck drivers (“Good Street!,” 2018-2022) involves extended periods of immersion in the day-to-day life of her subjects. She has worked with institutions, including the MAK Center in Los Angeles and the Austrian Cultural Forum in Berlin. Her publications include Monocle, ZEITmagazin, and Monopol, and she has received a studio grant at ISCP New York from the Austrian Federal Government. Her book ICC Berlin was published in 2022 by Jovis Verlag. Pfeifer studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and photography at the Friedl Kubelka School for Artistic Photography in Vienna. She holds lecturing positions at the Technical University Vienna and the Technical University Berlin.

STUDIO FABIEN CAPPELLO

Fabien Cappello (France, 1984) is a furniture and product designer. He studied at the University of Art and Design (ECAL) in Lausanne, Switzerland and obtained a master’s degree in Design Products at the Royal College of Art in London in 2009 under the tutelage of Martino Gamper and Jurgen Bey. Estudio Fabien Cappello is a spacial and furniture firm currently based in Guadalajara, Jalisco, after four years in Mexico City. The design studio’s work is part of the permanent collection at SFMOMA, The Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, and the National Centre for the Arts (CNAP) in Paris, France. Cappello’s work shares a high consideration for craft techniques and industrial production, reflecting design through people and their interactions with space, environment, and material culture.

Seeking Zohn is made possible, in part, with generous support from the City of West Hollywood, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Pasadena Art Alliance, the Los Angeles City Department of Cultural Affairs, Ago Projects, the Austrian Consulate General Los Angeles, Plant Material, and University of East London Production Support.

Read more about our residency program here.

The Artists & Architects-in-Residence Program at the Mackey Apartments is funded by the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport, in cooperation with the MAK — Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna.

Image Credit: Melanie Ebenhoch, 2022

Artists

Cathleen Schuster and Marcel Dickhage

titre provisoire (Cathleen Schuster/Marcel Dickhage) live and work in Berlin. They are working from a conceptual approach in time-based media and video installation. Recently, they developed the online journal Rosa Mercedes Issue No. 4 „Coincidences in Prepositions“ in collaboration with Renan Laru-an, the Vargas Museum Manila and the Harun Farocki Institut Berlin. Recent exhibitions include the public space of Semmering in Austria, Singapore Biennale 2019, D21 Leipzig, Sharjah Art Foundation, after the butcher Berlin, Taxispalais Kunsthalle Tirol, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof Hamburg, Berlinische Galerie, GfZK Leipzig, Ludlow 38 New York, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, SAVVY Contemporary and the Kyiv Biennale 2015. They are currently developing a new film installation for a solo exhibition in spring/summer 2023 in the Halle für Kunst in Lüneburg.

Louise Morin

Louise Morin is a French architect and designer who graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and ENSAPVS Paris architecture school. She has collaborated with several architectural offices in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Stockholm. Established in Paris since 2018, her work ranges from design to installation and architecture. Her work is currently exhibited in the Île de France architecture and landscape biennale (BAP Visible Invisible 05.22—07.22).

Melanie Ebenhoch

Melanie Ebenhoch (*1985) studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, at HKU Utrecht, and at the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam. She has exhibited at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Belvedere 21, Kunsthalle Wien, Galerie Martin Janda Vienna, Galerie der Stadt Schwaz, Union Pacific London, L’Inconnue Montreal, Heiligenkreuzerhof Vienna, Kevin Space Vienna, and Hester New York. She has upcoming exhibitions at KUnsthalle Bratislava, MQ Artbox Vienna, Kunstraum AA Bludenz, and the MAK Schindler Residency in Los Angeles.

Melanie Ebenhoch’s project is also supported by the Austrian Consulate General Los Angeles.

The Artists & Architects-in-Residence Program at the Mackey Apartments is funded by the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport, in cooperation with the MAK — Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna.

Image Credit: Melanie Ebenhoch, 2023

The exhibition Sunrise by Alex Katz is the latest iteration by the 95-year-old artist’s ongoing series he refers to as ‘splits’. Using a cut-up technique he blends inspiration from Manet’s pictures of women in hats in the sun, the fractured imagery from early cubism as well as the ‘cheap’ quality in Fassbinder’s ‘Beware of a Holy Whore,’ these large-scale immersive portraits of Sunrise Ruffalo encapsulate the fleeting nature of the gaze inside everyday life.

Alex Katz

Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, NY) is the preeminent painter of modern life. Acclaimed for his iconic portraits and impressionistic landscape depictions, the now 95-year-old Katz has inspired generations of painters.

Katz's work has been the subject of numerous retrospectives and solo presentations over the course of his expansive career. His work is in the permanent collections of over one hundred museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Tate, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; el Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; and the Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Katz lives and works in New York. He was the 2019 Honoree at TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art and had a solo survey exhibition at the Fosun Foundation in Shanghai in 2020. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, and a retrospective on view at The Guggenheim in New York until February 2023.

This exhibition is presented with support from Gladstone Gallery.

Above Image: Alex Katz , Sunrise 12, 2021. © Alex Katz / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.

Sagadin and Kiyomi Gork engage in a collaborative-method of work-creation and installation, presenting new responsive sculptural and sound works for Garage Exchange.

Sagadin produces a new series of wall-hung architectural paper works testing the spatial and symbolic relationship between two-and three-dimensional urbanism. Advertising posters are overpainted, glued and reinforced with aluminum foil. Paper is weathered and folded and hung into fixed shapes referencing elements of the city—blinds, curtains, air conditioning units, railings, rain gutters, or fountains. The shiny aluminum juxtaposed the old and weathered painted posters, mirroring the colors to amplify past visions of the future and rays of light for warmth. These text-less color fields obfuscate the poster’s informational function, drawing attention instead to recirculation, recycling, and impermanence. Small objects playfully emphasize the surrounding context.

Kiyomi Gork continues their attenuator series of soft sculptures, designed to absorb unwanted sound in a space. Previously the attenuator sculptures have taken the form of figurative and geological large scale objects. The new works take an architectural focus in the form of tall wool columns stretching from the floor to ceiling. 

The sculptures’ material properties complement a responsive sound work Kiyomi Gork fabricated on-site for the exhibition. Microphones in the Garage Top’s stairwell record noises made by the outdoor environment and visitors entering the space. The sound is then projected and echoed into the shared gallery, further activating the site and interacting with both of the artist’s sculptural works– amplified and softened at the same time. 

ABOUT GARAGE EXCHANGE

Garage Exchange seeks to foster relationships, conversations and collaborations in the arts between Los Angeles and Austria. In order to expand the cultural exchange at the core of the Artists and Architects-in-Residence program, The Austrian Federal Chancellery, 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.

Artists

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (born: 1982, Long Beach, CA) has been working with the intersection of sound, sculpture and performance since 2002. She studied sound art, photography and new genres at the San Francisco Art Institute and researched the history of communication technologies, acoustics and computer music at Stanford University where she received an MFA. 

Kiyomi Gork has had solo exhibitions at François Ghebaly, New York; Empty Gallery in Hong Kong; The Lab and Queens Nails Projects in San Francisco and 356 Mission Rd in Los Angeles. She has been a part of group exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, GES-VAC in Moscow, SFMOMA and Sculpture Center, New York. Kiyomi Gork has participated in residencies at Skowhegan, EMPAC, Mills College and Schloss Solitude in addition to receiving multiple grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Center for Cultural Innovation, Joan Mitchell Foundation and LACMA Art+Tech Grant. 

Performances have included multiple collaborations with Laetitia Sonami, the collective 0th and solo projects. 

Kiyomi Gork identifies as a mixed race queer fem (she/they) whose family came to the US, four generations ago from Okinawa (Ryukyu Islands), Japan and Eastern Europe. She was born and raised in Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Maruša Sagadin

Maruša Sagadin was born in 1978 in Ljubljana (Slovenia) and is based in Vienna (Austria). She studied architecture at TU Graz before transitioning to performative arts and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In 2015/2016, she participated in the ISCP Grant in New York City (USA), and in 2010, she was awarded the Schindler Grant at the MAK – Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (USA). From 2011 – 2017 she was Assistant Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, in the department for Performative Arts and Sculpture.

Her recent and upcoming exhibitions include Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt, Germany), Museum of Applied Arts (Vienna, Austria), Cukrarna Galleries (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Christine König Gallery in Vienna, Vestjyllands Kunstpavillon (Videbæk, Denmark), SPACE London (London, United Kingdom), NADA (NYC, USA), Austrian Cultural Forum New York (NYC, USA, Warsaw), Syndicate (Cologne, Germany), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, Austria), Neue Galerie (Innsbruck, Austria), Museum of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Belvedere21 (Vienna, Austria), Grazer Kunstverein (Graz, Austria), and Room of Requirement/Horse & Pony Fine Arts (Berlin, Germany). Her both monographs „Maruša Sagadin - ©MMXV“ (Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Vienna), 2016 and „A Happy Hippie“ (Spector Books, Leipzig), 2021 were finalist for Schönste Bücher Österreichs, a prize for books made in Austria from any discipline.

Maruša Sagadin's work is built on the connections and collisions between sculpture, architecture, urban space, gender and language. 

Maruša Sagadins sculptures touch on playfulness, imagination, and the pop-cultural accessibility of postmodern art, while working with the motif of the body, its form, its needs, and the care it requires – both the body of the particular viewer they are concerned about (and whom they provide with seating), and the human body as the universal measure of all sculpture. The nature of Maruša Sagadin’s work is neither typical nor unusual for feminist aesthetics – it is one of its many forms. (Vit Havránek)

Maruša Sagadin roams through a pop-cultural canon of urban countercultures, feminist and queer theory and modernist architecture. The compact materiality of her sculptures might be anchored in the visual language of a macho legacy of 20th-century modernism, yet she casually juggles around with these seemingly heavyweight concepts as if they were weightless, not unlike DC Comics’ Wonder Woman. Her critical reappraisal of slacker and skater cultures in correlation to a feminist artistic identity seeks for visual representation within these urban constructs, visualizing the city as a container of architectural memory – a map formed of concrete that only fully reveals its meaning when read in direct relation to its respective communities. (Hannes Ribarits)

This exhibition series is made possible by The Austrian Federal Chancellery.

Header image: Courtesy of the artists, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Empty Gallery HK, and Maruša Sagadin Christine König Galerie, Vienna, 2022.

Photography: Gabriel Bruce, 2022.