Farmlab Public Salon
Jim Heimann
Friday, April 4, 2008 @ Noon
Free Admission



Main Street Erased


About the Salon

Like much of L.A's built environment downtown Los Angeles has been subject to alteration. The thoroughfares of downtown have witnessed dramatic change in the past century and Main Street ( and surrounding arteries) presents a fascinating study of erasure.

About the Salon Presenter

Jim Heimann is the executive editor of Taschen America and came to that position after 30 years of freelancing in the design and illustration world. He has written copious numbers of books many focusing on regional architecture. Being a second generation Angeleno, his favorite subject is Los Angeles. He also is an instructor at Art Center College of Design.



Photos courtesy Jim Heimann

Labels: ,

 



 

Wildflowers Subject of Channel LA-18 T.V. News Story


The wildflowers located at the north side of the Los Angeles State Historic Park were featured in a recent television news story.

The native mix of fora are a planned legacy of the Not A Cornfield project. NAC, of course, was the artwork by Lauren Bon that preceded Farmlab.

Click here to view the bilingual piece, which includes interviews with officials from the AIA and Calif. State Parks, as well as footage of both a bee and a journalist, each engulfed in petals.

Screenshot taken from la18.tv

Labels: ,

 



 

Improvisational Duo
Tatsuya Nakatani & Oguri
Sunday, March 30 @ 7:30pm
Free Admission


Percussion + Dance


About the Performers

Tatsuya Nakatani (improvisational percussionist) is originally from Osaka, Japan. In 2006 he performed in 80 cities in 7 countries and collaborated with 163 artists worldwide. In the past 10 years he has released nearly 50 recordings on CD.

He has created his own instrumentation, effectively inventing many instruments and extended techniques. He utilizes drumset, bowed gongs, cymbals, singing bowls, metal objects, bells, and various sticks and bows to create an intense, organic music that defies category or genre. His music is based in improvised/ experimental music, jazz, free jazz, rock, and noise, yet retains the sense of space and beauty found in traditional Japanese folk music.

In addition to live solo and ensemble performances he works as a sound designer for film and television. He also teaches Masterclasses and Workshops at the University level. He also heads H&H Production, an independent record label and recording studio based in Easton, Pennsylvania. He was selected as a performing artist for the Pennsylvania Performing Artist on Tour (PennPat) roster as well as a Bronx Arts Council Individual Artist grant.

Tatsuya Nakatani website:
http://www.hhproduction.org/

Oguri (dance) is a regular performer at Farmlab and Under Spring.
Oguri /Body Weather Laboratory websiste: http://www.lightningshadow.com/

Labels: ,

 



 

Farmlab Public Salon
Islands of LA
Friday, March 28, 2008 @ Noon
Free Admission


How Can We Use Public Space?


About the Salon

We invite you to join in a discussion about how art can use available public space to create community and discussion. This is led by Islands of LA, an ongoing artwork that is turning traffic islands into territories of art to create community, promote intellectual discussions in public and explore the use and availability of public space.

What is public space? How can we use it? What role can art play?

There are many ways to think about public space. These questions can be approached from a variety of perspectives such as the artist, curator, city official, urban planner, architect or developer. Islands of LA invites us to suspend judgment for a brief moment and participate in an inquisitive discussion where we can offer our own ideas and try on other ones.

The discussion will also give us a chance to put our thoughts into action on the highly visible, yet mundane traffic island. This salon, then, is an opportunity to not only share different ideas but also to invite you to participate in the project by using the available public space of traffic islands.

About the Islands of LA Project

Islands of LA was conceived of as an art and curatorial project that utilizes the marginalized yet highly visible public spaces of traffic islands. Islands of LA views the traffic islands as spaces and venues in the everyday happening that can be used by artists to create community and stimulate inquisitive interchanges about a variety of topics related to the public including public land use.

The project began on 9/16/07 and was conceived of by artist Ari Kletzky. Islands of LA projects happen in different areas of the public sphere including public space, private space and a website. Most of the projects cross one or more of these areas.

For more info. on Islands of LA, please visit www.islandsofla.com



Images courtesy Islands of LA

Labels: ,

 



 

Farmlab Public Salon
Friday, September 26, 2008
Ismail Farouk
Free Admission

Exploring Narratives of Spatial Injustice in Johannesburg and L.A.


More Information about this Salon will be posted here soon.

Labels: ,

 



 

Farmlab Public Salon
Friday, August 22, 2008 @ Noon
Helen Mayer Harrison & Newton Harrison
Free Admission

"Four Works on the Culture of Extraction: The Serpentine Lattice, The Endangered Meadows of Europe, Green Heart of Holland, & Greenhouse Britain"


More information about this Salon:

Labels: ,

 



 

Farmlab Public Salon
James Rojas
Simon Pashuca & Georgia Sheridan
Friday, March 14, 2008 @ Noon-2pm
Free Admission


3-D, Participatory City Building Workshop
Using Found & Recycled Objects


About the Workshop

Using a medley of recycled materials, participants will be introduced to an innovated way to understand urban design and planning process. Participants will run through an exercise that uses 3-dimentional forms to discuss land use and urban design and planning. Urban design and planning is a multidisciplinary process involving everyone. The model building exercise allows participants to think of their planning goals in physical terms. It also shows participants how difficult it is to build the "ideal city" even when given a clean slate.

About the Workshop Organizers

Native Angelino James Rojas is community activist and a project manager for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Central Area Team, where he programs millions of dollars in pedestrian and urban design projects throughout Los Angeles County. Mr. Rojas co-founded the Latino Urban Forum (LUF), to help promote sustainable development in Low-income communities. LUF is a group of architects, urban planners and community activists interested in improving the built environment through transportation, open space and urban planning/design. LUF organizes residents around projects that celebrate public space and transportation, including the Expo Light Rail, Evergreen Jogging Path, Cornfields State Park, South Central Community Farm and the Nacimiento Bike Tour of nativity scenes in East Los Angeles .

Simon Pastucha lives without a car in the Los Angeles region. He is with the Urban Design Studio of the Los Angeles Department of City Planning. He began his 20-year career after graduating from California State Polytechnic University Pomona with a degree in Landscape Architecture with an emphasis on sustainability and large development projects. His experience covers projects worth over 20 billions dollars. He has processed projects ranging in size from complex single family and condominium subdivisions to commercial and industrial projects of over to 2,000,000 square feet. He served as Chief Planning Deputy for Councilman Michael Feuer working on major planning, transportation, neighborhood projects and planning legislation. He was a key part of the Charter Implementation Unit of the Los Angeles Department of City Planning, where a small team brought the existing land use codes into compliance with the new City Charter. He worked on amendments to the Los Angeles Municipal Code regarding reducing impediments to new housing, adaptive reuse of existing structures, and code simplification. He created and supervised the Expedited Processing Section of the Los Angeles Department of City Planning. It set records for reducing the time from application to written decision. He currently works in the new Urban Design Studio of the Los Angeles Planning Department. The mission of the Urban Design Studio is to integrate urban design into the development of City policy by doing real planning, being efficient and effective, developing innovative solutions and engaging the community.

Raised in the artsy mountain town of Santa Fe, NM, Georgia Sheridan has bounced across the United States and globe before landing in Los Angeles. The daughter of an artist and lawyer, Georgia studied political science and fine arts during her undergraduate education at Emory University , writing her honors thesis on the use of think thank research in Congressional policymaking. After college, she followed her political interests to Washington , D.C. and worked for in the health law section of Fulbright & Jaworski LLP. Having second thoughts about law school and curious about her sister’s degree in Architecture, Georgia started looking into design related professions. When Hurricane Katrina hit the southeastern coast, Georgia found her calling and quickly applied to graduate school. She quit her job to travel throughout South Africa and SE Asia before arriving in Los Angeles to get her masters degree in Urban Planning at UCLA. While attending UCLA, Georgia worked with Walker Wells at Global Green USA, helping plan a green school symposium and writing a research report on carbon neutral policies for cities. She now works in the Planning Department for the City of West Hollywood and is writing a report on long term sustainable policies to expand the reach of the City’s Green Building Program to the public right-of-way through green streetscape design. At UCLA, Georgia helped start the student interest group design and development (d2), working to expand the design reach of urban planning at UCLA.



Photos courtesy James Rojas; photos by (top): Deniz Durmus, and (bottom), James Baker

Labels: ,

 



 

Farmlab Public Salon
Joshua Decter
Friday, March 7, 2008 @ Noon
Free Admission


"How to be 'Situational'"


About the Salon

Join Joshua Decter for a consideration of the notion of 'situational' art practices and 'situational' curatorial projects, in relation to contradictions of place and placelessness, location and dislocation.

About the Salon Presenter

Joshua Decter is a critic, curator, art historian and theorist. Since the late 1980s, he has been writing on art, organizing exhibitions and other events, and teaching, primarily from a base in New York. Decter is a contributor to Artforum, Afterall and other periodicals, and has curated exhibitions at PS1 in New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Kunsthalle Vienna, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, among other institutions, and was a curatorial interlocutor for the inSite_05 San Diego /Tijuana exhibition project. He has organized numerous public conferences, including "The Situational Drive: Complexities of Public Sphere Engagement," in collaboration with inSite San Diego/Tijuana and Creative Time, New York, presented at The Cooper Union, NY, in May 2007.

Decter was recently appointed Assistant Professor and Director of the Public Art Studies Program at the Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and he is also on the graduate committee at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.


Image: A photograph of Pawel Althamer's project for "Path," a recent Sculpture Projects Munster exhibition

Image courtesy Joshua Decter

Labels: ,