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.

Brandon LaBelle, Motel Polytope (Xenakis in LA)
The motel room is a space of tourism, fantasy, criminality and transience, allowing temporary occupation that, since its development in the 1950s has increasingly occupied the landscape with its varying architectures. The Motel Polytope project is based on a series of interventions staged in Hollywood motels during the course of a week’s tourism. The interventions take the form of paint applications performed directly onto the rooms during a night’s occupation. The work draws upon the composer and architect Iannis Xenakis, who developed a highly unique approach to music composition, often uniting mathematics with musical ideas. Considering the motel room, the project playfully inserts additional geometries to the existing spaces, appropriating their often-uniform look for distributing more personalized modifications.

*Diary

Vista Motel
4900 Sepulveda Blvd
Room 219

green dots, across furniture and corners

Saharan Motor Hotel
7212 Sunset Blvd
Room 116

yellow highlight

Ramada Marina del Rey
3130 Washington Blvd
Room 215

white and blue diagonals, softly finding a new movement

Hollywood Guest Inn
6700 West Sunset Blvd.
Room 232

orange diagonals, improvised

Hollywood Inn Express North
5131 Hollywood Blvd
Room 125

vertical lines each parallel to a corner – to make a second shadow

Hollywood 7 Star Motel
1730 North La Brea Avenue
Room 216

blue and pink dots, as an overlay onto the wallpaper of roses

Hollywood Downtowner Inn
5601 Hollywood Blvd
Room 27

wrapping the room with grey dots, like a decorative crown