Surface Tension_Los Angeles

The exhibition focuses around questions pertaining to the built environment, with a specific focus on Los Angeles. Following the question - What remains of a building divided into equal parts and distributed for reconfiguration? - participating artists will explore the role architecture plays in defining relationships in the city: How does the particular architectural environment of LA contribute to forms of social exchange? What local historical forces have led to the conditions of the built and how do such histories continue to position or locate the body? What architectural tensions might be teased out to initiate dialogue across the urban fabric? Forms of spatial intervention, imaginary building projects, and appropriations and poetic modifications to the built environment will feature as methods for developing sited inquiry. From such a perspective, participating artists will question existing patterns of the built environment within Los Angeles while seeking to occupy, through forms of performance and intervention, the sites of examination.

Cindy Santos Bravo, The Highs and Lows vol. II: “Jelly Roll” Morton as a Stranger in LA
This project is an extension of my installation The Highs and Lows vol. I created for a group exhibition at LA ArtCore gallery in 2007. The first volume fragmented the look and lyrics of Bronzeville in Little Tokyo (1942-45). The Highs and Lows vol. II is a piece that revisits LA’s historical jazz influences and utilizes narrative fragments about Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton and his 6th street locale Cadillac Café (1917-1918) in a single-channel video montage. The piece reawakens the location of Cadillac Café by recounting the site’s history and the story of Morton’s journey out west as a stranger in a city full. The montage searches for traces of Morton’s aspirations in LA, the idea of artistic community, and the intersection of early 20th century American music in 21st century Downtown Los Angeles. The video is in collaboration with MAETAR and Valleys and Empires, who created two musical compositions inspired by the words of Jelly Roll Morton from a 1938 Library of Congress interview. Vol. II is a visual arrangement of a forgotten historical site which welcomed strangers to experiment and use Jazz as a contemporary voice.