MAK CENTER WELCOMES 31st GROUP OF RESIDENTS
Program Brings International Artists & Architects to L.A.
As an important part of its mission, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture hosts early career artists and architects for six-month live/work residencies at the R.M. Schindler designed Mackey Apartments (1939) in the mid-city section of Los Angeles. Awarded competitively, the MAK Center residencies bring international artists and architects to Los Angeles to work on projects that engage the city as subject or inspiration. Just as the MAK Center tests the boundaries between disciplines, the residency program promotes exchanges between the L.A. art and design communities and colleagues from around the world. This fall, the MAK Center welcomes Group XXXI, a pan-European group whose work has been seen worldwide.
German artist Dennis Loesch will continue work on a series of sculptures called memory sticks. These are narrow, squared-off wooden sticks, usually several feet in length, which are wrapped in the photographic documentation of cultural events Loesch has either hosted or attended. By both displaying and transforming the documentation into a new generation of art object, the sticks become a way for the artist to integrate traces of bygone events into new situations. In Los Angeles, Loesch plans to produce new memory sticks, and transform them into usable interior/ exterior objects (chair, table, lamp, …) inspired by his new surroundings. The documentation of Loesch’s experience in LA will be turned into objects that relate to the place of their creation.
Architect Ivan Niedermair was born in Bressanone, Italy and has been studying architecture since 2003 at the Institute for Experimental Architecture, University of Innsbruck, Austria. In 2006, he was part of a student group that designed and built a kindergarten in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has won several prizes, among them most recently the 4th International Marianne Brandt Competition 2010 (Germany). His work has been shown at the DMY International Design Festival Berlin (2009), Best-Of ’09 Bauarchiv Innsbruck, London Design Festival (2008) and Galerie Museum Bozen (2008). During his residency, Neidermair proposes to experiment with ideas of how Los Angeles might function as a “post-oil” city.
Born in Wroclaw, Poland, artist Patrycja German currently lives and works in Berlin. Following master studies at the Academy of Fine Art in Karlsruhe, Germany, German has established a career centered around performance art, video art and photography. She has exhibited and performed prolifically across Europe and participated in numerous video festivals. German’s performances usually include herself as subject and playfully engage spectators by challenging their perspectives in unexpected ways. In Los Angeles, German plans a performance series that will explore how a performative intervention can transform a space by altering its substance and significance. She also expects to observe whether the social codes of a new locale will influence her work.
Architects and residency partners Adam Vukmanov and Julia Koerner hail from Serbia and Austria, respectively. Both trained in the studio of Greg Lynn as graduate students at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. They are now currently based in London where Vukmanov is a design architect at ACME Space and Koerner works as designer/architect in the Ross Lovegrove Studio. In Los Angeles, they will explore the idea of bringing nature back into the city via animated, stereoscopic images derived from engineering structures and visual patterns observed in the natural world. Projecting these images into architectural spaces, will create a mobile, 3-D experience in the border zone between reality and virtuality.
The MAK Center for Art & Architecture at the Schindler House is located at 835 N. Kings Road in West Hollywood. Public hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Free admission for Friends of the MAK Center and on Fridays, 4 to 6 p.m. Parking is available at the public structure at the northeast corner of Kings Road and Santa Monica Boulevard. For further information about the MAK Center and the Artists and Architects in Residence program www.MAKcenter.org