The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to present the 22nd iteration of Garage Exchange Vienna—Los Angeles: and yet you grow featuring work by Vienna-based artist Christian Kosmas Mayer and Los Angeles-based artist Gala Porras-Kim at the Mackey Apartments Garage Top Gallery.
There is something growing in the gallery.
Nine years ago, Christian Kosmas Mayer planted a palm tree in the courtyard of the Mackey Apartments as part of MAK Center’s Artists and Architects-in-Residence Program. The residency ended and moved on to the subsequent groups of residents, but the palm tree remained, under the care of the institution, where it remains today.
In this exhibition, Christian Kosmas Mayer, joined by Los Angeles-based artist Gala Porras-Kim, revisits this living sculpture for an in-depth exploration of the functions and roles of the art institution. Both Mayer and Porras-Kim utilize the exhibition space as a site to foster discourse and critique how art institutions exercise forms of care within collecting practices. The MAK Center is a unique context as it is a non-collecting exhibition space, but it preserves and cares for three R. M. Schindler designed properties in Los Angeles. In this sense, the exhibition spaces are the collection.
This unique relationship between exhibition space and care practice forms the basis of and yet you grow. Porras-Kim’s Forecasting Signal is a site-activated sculpture that extracts ambient water from the gallery environment and filters it through a hanging burlap sheet saturated with graphite, extended from the ceiling. As the water accumulates, it drips through the material onto a panel where it makes an image. This process occurs repeatedly through the duration of the exhibition, and turns the exhibition space itself into what could be considered a process-based drawing.
When: THU, OCT 19, 2023 SUN, JAN 7, 2024
Where: Mackey Apartments and Garage Top1137 South Cochran AvenueLos Angeles, CA 90019
Fore more information and RSVP please visit www.makcenter.org