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.

Ken Ehrlich, Relocating Aelita
The installation specifically explores the architecture of the new LAPD headquarters building through an abstract engagement with Aelita: The Queen of Mars , a classic silent Soviet film made in 1924. Built on the site of a proposed civic park, the new LAPD headquarters building sits across from City Hall and was inaugurated in October around the time of the announcement of Charlie Beck's appointment as the new Chief of Police. Relocating Aelita centers around attempts to engage the participation of the LAPD in loosely scripted re-enactments by off duty officers of key scenes from the original film. Aelita, an early post-revolutionary Russian big-budget cinematic spectacle that follows a Soviet engineer who, after receiving signals from outer space and falling in love with the Queen of Mars, travels to and initiates a revolution against the despotic rulers of Mars. It involves space travel, romantic intrigue and stunning Constructivist sets and costume design. Linking narratives of the site of the new headquarters building with re-created elements of the film, the installation traces a series of formal relationships between constructivist set design, theories of montage, new media, post-modern architecture, performativity and power relations.