POLYTOPIA

Civic Center

Multi-media construction

32" x 32" x 32"

Various found and repurposed objects, Motors, Leds, Embedded video and sound.

Emerging amid the wave of redevelopment transforming Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles after 2015, City Center presents an eccentric response to the ambitions of urban planning. It resembles an architectural model but refuses the discipline of scale. Found objects, fabricated structures, and repurposed consumer goods assume the roles of buildings, plazas, and civic landmarks, while motors, illumination, video, and sound animate a miniature environment in which interior and exterior, public and private, continually exchange their attributes.

The city becomes a site of negotiation between the places we inhabit and the social arrangements that give them their character. Polis, the civic body, and Topos, the place it occupies, enter a shifting relationship, suggesting that neither can be fully understood independently of the other.

Traditional craftsmanship mingles with improvised construction and readily available commodities. This heterogeneous assembly evokes the long history of ideal cities, from Aristotle's polis to modern urban utopias, while exposing the unruly contingencies such models try to regulate.

The resulting buildings concentrate an assortment of interests, vocations, and rituals. Houses of pleasure and correction, centers of authority and recreational enclaves coexist in configurations that combine innovation with archaism, architectural aspiration with domestic eccentricity.

At Emancipation Plaza, the Homunculus Hegemon occupies a cockpit overlooking Inferno Square. Across its ventilated abyss, the animated storefronts of the Atavistic Gender Pavilion solicit attention. These arresting landmarks suggest a civic order whose promises of emancipation, authority, and fulfillment are inseparable from the peculiar apparatuses that sustain them.

Polytopia awaits your visit!