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.

Related Exhibition

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to present the 21st iteration of Garage Exchange Vienna—Los Angeles: Plastic, Plastic, Plastic featuring new work by Vienna-based artist Kerstin von Gabain and Los Angeles-based artist Ellen Schafer at the Mackey Apartments Garage Top Gallery. The artists confront the legacy of Modernist idealism that Schindler considers in his architectural work alongside the proliferation of mass-produced materials.

Plastic, Plastic, Plastic
Text by Angella d’Avignon

“The German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht hated the Westside. He hated Hollywood, the only part of Los Angeles he seemed to be familiar with. When he arrived in 1941, Santa Monica was flat while he lived there—nothing but manicured lawns and oil derricks in dust fields.

The Mackey Apartments are replicated* at Disney World in Florida to signify a modern California apartment—the platonic ideal of apartments, landmarked as classic Los Angeles architecture although they were built in the last eighty or so years. The idea that California held the dream of the mythic West itself in its "empty" landscape, that acreage could ensure legacy, that private property meant success. These precious places built by eccentrics and exiles, polished apartments made for one specific person, sit empty most of the time, while renters drift in and out of sublets and single family studios. These interiors hold other people's boring day to day existences, hovering together anachronistic in the psychic space of a room.

In Los Angeles, you can tell the time of the month by the amount of furniture on the sidewalk—entire sofa sets, wayward mattresses, coffee tables and glass cabinets. Recognizable objects from one's interior is a kind of body horror—I once spotted a stack of metallic plastic cups I'd bought for my first apartment in my twenties from a store I thought was expensive. No one else had party cups like mine at the time, yet here they are on someone else's stairs, outside someone else's apartment that looks replicable, like it could be anywhere in suburban Southern California.

The word polymer means ‘of many parts,’ and polymers are made of long chains of molecules. Polymers abound in nature. Cellulose, the material that makes up the cell walls of plants, is a common natural polymer. Synthetic polymers are made up of long chains of atoms, arranged in repeating units, often much longer than natural ones. The length of these chains, and the patterns in which they are arrayed, make polymers strong, lightweight, and flexible. In other words, it’s what makes them so plastic.

Plastic ensured that human manufacturing would never be limited by the resources offered by the natural world. Roland Barthes called plastic ‘miraculous,’ writing that ‘plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation,’ since any substance—ivory, tortoiseshell, glass—could be made from plastic. Barthes continues, ‘The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas.’ The 21st century world is saran wrapped: by 2050, the ocean will be more plastic than water.

While plastic wooed the mid-century U.S, long-chains of houses proliferated across Brecht's hellish flat fields, entire neighborhoods sprouting up like manicured weeds, filling with mass manufactured domestic housewares made in consumer-grade plastic, taunting the poet's former presence in Los Angeles, after he fled again for his native Germany after 15 years of exile in the U.S. during World War II. Layers of layers of daily life held forth in these houses and apartments, each one haunting the next generation while the plastic utensils, hair combs, high chairs, bed pans, and party cups outlive every vision of utopia that anyone's had about Los Angeles since. 

The narrative of transience is scaled by class. The burdens of precarity and desire meet in the well-appointed interiors whose objects' total value will never outweigh the endlessly unaffordable exterior in which they're housed. We are not the objects we consume but rather the paths we tread through spaces anonymous to anyone who treads them in our absence.”

*While the Prime Time Cafe at Disney World’s Hollywood Studios is not an exact replica of the Mackey Apartments, the Imagineers used it as inspiration to construct a general set of modern California apartments representing idealized mid-century living.

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to present Seeking Zohn, an exhibition of works by Mexican-Austrian architect and engineer Alejandro Zohn (1930-2000) through contemporary photography and design. The exhibition takes as subject Zohn’s robust civic and commercial architecture built in Guadalajara from the 1950s to the 1990s, with an interest in how the city’s social, cultural, and material histories are interwoven with his structures. 

Commissioned photography and video by artists Adam Wiseman, Lake Verea, Onnis Luque, Sonia Madrigal, and Zara Pfeifer veer from the documentary conceit of architectural photography toward the subjective. This work is decidedly interpretive, seeking out the many narratives contained within parks, markets, collective housing, malls, and bureaucratic buildings. Zohn, a Jewish emigree who fled Vienna during World War II at the age of 8, dedicated his career to creating a modern Guadalajara. Through these photographs—acts of investigation and translation—we find glimpses of his utopian desire amidst the chaos, beauty, and violence of everyday life. 

Seeking Zohn is the first presentation of Zohn’s architecture in Los Angeles. The transposition of his work to L.A. places it in dialogue with R.M. Schindler’s designs. As both architects are Jewish émigrés, a parallel exists between the Austrian-Mexican and the Austrian-Angeleno’s experiences. The installation at the MAK Center creates a resonant triangulation between three cities: Vienna, Guadalajara, and Los Angeles. Billboards placed in the garden navigate between the urban scale of Zohn’s buildings and the intimacy of the Schindler House. Household objects designed by Studio Fabien Cappello and fabricated by artisans in Guadalajara build a bridge between the civic and domestic realms.

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to announce Final Projects: Group LII, exhibiting three works produced by our Artists and Architects-in-Residence, Cathleen Schuster, Marcel Dickhage, Louise Morin, & Melanie Ebenhoch. Final Projects: Group LII marks the culmination of the 52nd iteration of the Artists and Architects-in-Residence Program at the Mackey Apartments.

For the Saturday presentation of Louise Morin’s work, please visit The Garden, 1911 7th Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90018, on Saturday, March 11, 2023, from 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM. This is a free event, no RSVP required. Morin’s work will also be on view at the Mackey Apartments Garage Top for the duration of the exhibition.

Read more about our residency program here.

Join the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Schindler House, for the opening reception Alex Katz: Sunrise. The exhibition is the latest iteration by the 95-year-old artist’s ongoing series he refers to as ‘splits’. Using a cut-up technique he blends inspiration from Manet’s pictures of women in hats in the sun, the fractured imagery from early cubism as well as the ‘cheap’ quality in Fassbinder’s ‘Beware of a Holy Whore,’ these large-scale immersive portraits of Sunrise Ruffalo encapsulate the fleeting nature of the gaze inside everyday life.

This event is free and open to the public. No RSVP required. Refreshments will be served.

The MAK Center is pleased to present the twentieth iteration of Vienna — Los Angeles Garage Exchange: Maruša Sagadin & Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork. Vienna-based artist Maruša Sagadin collaborates with Los Angeles artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork. The artists respond to each other’s work to develop an exhibition for the Mackey Apartments’ Garage Top Gallery.

This is a free public event. No RSVP required.

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to announce Final Projects: Group LI, exhibiting two installations produced by our Artists and Architects-in-Residence, Kamilla Bischof and Robin Durand. The residents open their respective apartment units to exhibit two unique final project installations, Kamilla Bischof: Princess Bone, and Robin Durand: A Traverse of L.A. Select installation elements stretch out to the Garage Top outdoor courtyard.

Kick off your Labor Day weekend with music, hot dogs, and contemporary art and architecture at the Opening Reception for Final Projects: Group LI, Thursday, September 1st, starting at 6:00 PM. Complemented with an Open House of select Mackey Apartment units. This is a free public event. No RSVP required.