Host curators are Mimi Zeiger (Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design), Leonardo Bravo and River Jukes-Hudson (Big City Forum), and Sarah Lorenzen (Neutra VDL Research House).
This fall, curators from three Los Angeles-based organizations come together as part of World Wide Storefront, a Storefront for Art and Architecture project, to present Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles. This series of exhibitions and events is a collaboration between Big City Forum, Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, and the Neutra VDL Research House.
Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles explores the multivalent meaning of “host” though spectacle, parasitic opportunism, and domestic landscapes. The Neutra VDL Research House serves as the site of these investigations and the house, embedded with spatial effects—mirrors, screens, and pools of water—heightens and confuses the relationship between the domestic interior and the exterior.
Host features a penthouse exhibition of drawings and models by Medellin-based architect and landscape architect Luis Callejas that exploits environmental connections between his practice and the Neutra VDL Research House. Big City Forum will host a talk between Callejas and Wonne Ickx of Mexico City’s Productora.
Host includes LA Forum’s Out There Doing It series. Select emerging architects, designers, and writers present work and reflect on Southern California’s cultural landscape. The OTDI series concludes with a potluck curated by Jia Gu of Supper Studio. The 2014 OTDI participants represent expanded architecture and design practice. Their work ventures, sometimes organically and sometimes parasitically, into extra-disciplinary territories and includes film, gaming, publishing, and narrative.
Opening, House
Thursday, September 25, 6-8 pm
Dark picnic on Silver Lake reservoir lawn and house lighting
Exhibition opening: Wet Horizons, Luis Callejas, LCLA Office
Saturday, October 11, 7-10 pm
Discussion between Luis Callejas, LCLA Office and Wonne Ickx, Productora
Sunday, October 12, 10 am-12 pm
Out There Doing It Round Table Discussion
Thursday, October 16, 7 pm
OTDI participants discuss their work in relationship to landscape, practice, and Los Angeles. Moderator: Sarah Lorenzen
2014 OTDI Participants:
Erin Besler and Ian Besler
Laurel Consuelo Broughton and Andrew Kovacs
Jose Sanchez, Plethora Projects
Katya and Alexei Tylevich, Friend & Colleague
Out There Doing It, (G)host Landscapes
Thursday, October 30, 7 pm
The second installment of the LA Forum’s 2014 Out There Doing It series, this year presented as part of Host: Natural Histories Los Angeles, a World Wide Storefront participant, asks designers to present reflections on “ghost landscapes” as filtered through their own design practices.
Join us the evening before Halloween for tall tales of those lost terrains and speculations that prove specters in contemporary discourse. Moderated by Sam Lubell.
Out There Doing It Potluck
Thursday, November 13, 7 pm
The final World Wide Storefront event for Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles is Potluck, featuring participants from LA Forum’s Out There Doing It series. Supper Studio hosts the evening, serving small eats by Anthony Martin of PATAO and visual treats by Jonathan Crisman of No Style. For the thirteenth rendition of Supper Studio, each OTDI team is invited to design a freestanding table as their contribution to the potluck. The individual tables form one long, collective table, an exquisite and parasitic corpse running through the length of the VDL House.