Last spring, as stay-at-home orders set in and consumers cleared out store shelves, we learned something that we probably knew all along: You don’t think about toilet paper until you are desperate.
And if the lowly roll is overlooked, the design of the toilet paper holder is even less considered — until now. The Echo Park gallery Marta is presenting “Under/Over,” an exhibition of more than 50 toilet paper holders by an international lineup of artists and designers.
The long-awaited follow-up to the now-canonical ‘Evil People in Modernist Homes in Popular Films’ (2010), ‘Sad People’ examines the filmic trope of housing unhappy characters inside of modernist architecture.
Case studies via ten characters / homes / films, from Colin Firth’s George Falconer inside John Lautner’s Schaffer Residence in Tom Ford’s ‘A Single Man’ (2009) to Brigitte Bardot’s Camille Javal inside Adalberto Libera’s Casa Malaparte in Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Le Mépris’ (1963).
Essays by Erik Benjamins, Andrew Romano, Adam Štěch (Okolo), and Mimi Zeiger. Ed. by Benjamin Critton.
A Weather Report from the City of Dreadful Joy
Only the Eameses were happy.
Charles’ Midwest smile was straight from central casting. Ray, a Sacramento daughter tucked in pinafore, was filled to the brim with Gold Rush enthusiasm for Los Angeles, Modernism, and everyday things of the world. What is a fiberglass shell chair (especially in bright yellow or aquamarine) if not a belief in progress, democracy, technology, and the sunny potential of design?
Everyone else was miserable.