Photo: Seymour Rosen, 1972. ©SPACES Archives–Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments
Join us for the opening reception of Kathi Hofer and Preserving Bottle Village Committee . This exhibition brings together original bottles from Tressa “Grandma” Prisbrey’s collapsed Bottle Village structures, Prisbrey’s assemblage artwork, and works by Hofer placing them in a “magic circle” at the Mackey Apartment Garage Top Gallery where the objects and artifacts relate and resemble one another (ex)changing their value and meaning.
KATHI HOFER
Kathi Hofer (b. 1981, Hallein, Austria) works conceptually across media. She is interested in forms of everyday creativity and their specific freedoms and constraints as well as in the relationship between artistic work and socio-economics. In her installations she integrates found objects, images, stories, and practices that have strongly determined the roles and values within the environments she grew up in or moves within today. In addition to her installation-based work, she has recently turned to immaterial practices and experimental forms of storytelling. In this context, she has initiated improvised encounters between actors from different cultural fields or backgrounds in public or semi-private space staging unannounced performances that took place in the absence of an audience. Of these unrehearsed, unnoticed actions photographic evidence remains that is open for further interpretation. Recent exhibitions include Continental Baths (London, UK), the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles, US), Winona (Brussels, Belgium), Tokyo Arts and Space (Tokyo, Japan), Austrian Cultural Forum (Warsaw, Poland), MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (Vienna, Austria), and mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (Vienna, Austria). Her book “Grandma” Prisbrey’s Bottle Village was published by Spector Books, Leipzig (2021).
PRESERVING BOTTLE VILLAGE COMMITTEE
Preserve Bottle Village Committee is a non-profit organization formed in July 1979 to acquire and restore the privately-owned historic property. In the intervening decades, dedicated members have been responsible for ensuring the protection of Bottle Village. The long-term objective of the organization is to allow public access on a regular basis to the fully improved and restored Bottle Village. In 2012, the organization initiated a comprehensive restoration approach for the entire one-third acre site and its historic components. For the Garage Exchange exhibition, Preserve Bottle Village Committee board member Katherine Weisman collaborated closely with Kathi Hofer, the MAK Center, and RLA retrieving and selecting artifacts.
This exhibition series is made possible by The Austrian Federal Chancellery.
KATHI HOFER AND PRESERVING BOTTLE VILLAGE COMMITTEE
April 18, 2024 — June 16, 2024