Exhibition Opened and closed May 20th, 2017 at the Royal Viking Motel in Los Angeles as part of One Night Stand LA. Guest Curated by Kyle Miller, Jennifer Bonner and Volkan Alkanoglu. Organized by Anthony Morey, Ryan Martinez, and William Hu.
The call for this years One Night Stand leaves little room for debate about its intentions. It’s clear; participants are asked to “abandon installations as a primary medium for [architectural] production” with the underlying premise that “experimentally minded architects have been relegated to the lower ranks of cultural production” resulting in installation fatigue. There is no concrete evidence that this true, though it is provocative. Nevertheless, for those inclined to accept this claim as a virtue of participation, then one must reflect carefully upon it. It seems that a possible first step towards an installation free culture, as desired by the curatorial team, would be to publicly archive in the form of mockery the very materials and tools that are complicit in the making of the aforementioned offending culture of installations. But as we know, architects are often have a tendency towards hoarding. Stashed, slumped, stored, and stacked in my West Oakland office are rolls of faux fur, swaths fake grass, unused frames, felt rolls, strings, saws, samples, models, wood veneers, reclaimed windows, old peanut butter, boxes of parts, bins of things, tubs, tubes, tarps, tape measures, hammers, paint tins, paint rollers, paint brushes, paint samples, painted paper, invented gizmos, prodding sticks, poker poles, grabby things, LED lights, ladders, cords, pins, pens, paper, glue, glass, goo, foam, metal, plastic, bungee cords, pad locks, and assortment of other 'stuff" necessary for producing an installation in the first place. No longer needed in an architectural installation-free world as requested in this call, these tools and materials not only lose their functional and, by extension, their disciplinary value (or, value to the discipline of making anyway) they also represent an archive of apparent ill-placed labor and economic mis-investment in the apparently irrelevant pursuit of meaningful, experimental, and disciplinary work. Thus, they are strewn around the room in a manner of indifference to their uses, scales, proximity, or proper orientations as a horror vaccui of "meaningless" things. But whatever, at the end of the night, its all really just stuff in a room, anyway.