Sneak Peek! Art Meets Architecture at West Hollywood’s Mackey Residency Reveal
Author:Lindsey ShookHere it is – the moment they’ve all been waiting for: the big reveal of the final Mackey projects. Twice a year West Hollywood’s MAK Center invites two artists and two architects to become Mackey Residents and participate in one of the most prestegious residences in the country. Fellows are given an apartment and resources to create a project that explores the relationship between art and architecture, and the results are often spectacular. Next Friday, the latest batch of Mackey residences will reveal their final projects to the public.
The Mackey Apartments with artist gallery space provides a blank canvas for design work.
To showcase the projects, the MAK center hosts a reception featuring the artists’ work, which takes place next Friday, March 9. It’s an event that we look forward to and can’t wait to see next week.
Take a sneak peek at some of the projects!
Christoph Eppacher designed this Lattice Tower with Martin Oberascher
Resident and architect Christoph Eppacher has studied Los Angeles geography and its built environment via two distinct, disparate subjects: the studio and set locations for classic silent films by Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Llyod, and the paths and serving areas of LA’s vibrant food truck scene. Breaking down dozens of films frame-by-frame led Eppacher to understand historic Los Angeles. through a blend of permanent and temporary architectural sites. This, combined with cycling hundreds of kilometers to visit food truck stops gives him a unique understanding of the layout of Los Angeles. Eppacher will share his subjective mapping experience in an installation, Silent Territories. The project presents two conflicting maps in different media. A ceiling-size representation of the Los Angeles basin formed by thin, hanging paper strips and plastic molds of the topography of central LA set on tables will mark the overlap of silent film and food truck locations. Photographs and texts will further explicate Eppacher’s research process.
A rendering done by Morteza Farhadian Dehkordi.
Morteza Farhadian Dehkordi and Shima Roshanzamir are architects based in Vienna. Urban researchers, they are particularly interested in studying how individuals engage and maneuver through city grids. The architects have spent their time in LA observing the particular ways political and physical structures impact the movements of its citizenry. To further explore these concepts, Dehkordi and Roshanzamir have developed computer programs which abstractly present different scenarios to track ways in which individuals might find their own routes and paths and self-organize within a hypothetical city. In their installation, Enabling Fields, they will present a manifesto and several video screens depicting the multiple layers of improvisation at play as one navigates urban space, and how cultivation of this process might change our understanding of the city.
Spill Scatter Remade in a Way by Lasse Schmidt Hansen in 2008.
Berlin-based artist Lasse Schmidt Hansen has utilized library collections around Los Angeles to build an archive documenting the patterned commercial carpet that covered the gallery floors at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in the 1960s and early 1970s. Hansen has found dozens of photos of iconic California and international artworks installed either directly on top of the carpet, or on pedestals and the surrounding walls. To Hansen, the carpet functions as an ironic sign of the existing notions about art and art objects that local and international minimalist artists were questioning at exactly that time. Hansen plans to lay a similar carpet in the Mackey Apartments’ rear courtyard, greeting all visitors, as well as an installation of photographs of the original carpet in several iterations at LACMA between 1965 and 1974.
Johann Lurf’s 2010 film Endeavor gave viewers the feeling of flight.
Filmmaker Johann Lurf has spent several months documenting Morris Reservoir near Asuza, California, which functioned for decades as a military torpedo testing site and water source. Torpedos were fired into the water at different angles, using a movable ramp structure. Now that the site has been decommissioned, all that remains are infrastructural oddities. Lurf’s intention has been to produce a video study of the site’s immediate context and its place in the larger conversation of L.A. civil engineering. The final product of this research will be a short, looped film projected in the Mackey Garage Top. Several different shots of the dam and its surrounding topography will play in sequence, each having a precise focus and a subtle movement, mimicking visual perception.
The Friday evening reception takes place from 7-9 p.m. and is open and free to the public. Projects will remain on view Saturday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; 1137 South Cochran Avenue in Los Angeles.
