'Chora Prints' Exhibition Closed Monday
Dec. 1 is International Day Without Art


In honor of the upcoming international Day Without Art, the Chora Prints 2008 exhibition at Farmlab / The Studio will be dark on December 1, 2008.

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SALON CALENDAR 2009

December 2009
December 11
Nance Klehm: Everything Comes into this World Hungry: Soilmaking and Building More Info

December 4
T. Julie Mairs, Carmen de Arce, Monica Carrasco, Taja McKinney Zisler, Susannah Faxon‐Mills: Human Trafficking in Los Angeles County. Organized with the Studio for Southern California History in conjunction with the exhibition Law & Disorder More Info

November 2009
November 20, 2009
Paulette Singley: Figure, Field, and Squid: The Construction of Space in Bacon’s Painting and Ludwig Mies van derRohe’s Architecture More Info

November 13, 2009
Laura Valdés Kuri and Claudio Valdés Kuri: Environment, Art and Science in Mexico
With Q & A in Spanish and English More Info

November 6, 2009
Aaron Chappell & Juan de Lara: Building The American Dream in the Inland Empire More Info

October 2009
October 30

October 23
Sherwood Chen, Flavio Alvarez & Carlos Gonzales: Alliance for CaliforniaTraditional Arts More Info

October 16
Suma Josson: Screening and Discussion of I Want My Father Back More Info

October 9
Jessica Hall: Creek Freak More Info

October 2
Felicity Powell: Medals of Dishonour More Info

September 2009
September 25
Julian Laird: Svalbard Global Seed Vault More Info

September 18
Otis Public Practice: Reunion/Reunion More Info

September 11
Rickey Smith: Urban Green on Spring More Info

September 4
Dan Ethridge: A New Food Landscape in post-Katrina New Orleans More Info

August 2009
August 28
Kirk Anderson + Amy Seidenwurm: Let the Bees be Bees! More Info

August 21
Detective Don Hrycyk: Art Fraud in LA More Info

August 14
Greenmeme: Weaving the Landscape More Info + VIDEO

August 7
Charles Phoenix: Charles Phoenix' Retro Slide Show Tour of Southern California More Info

July 2009
July 31
Finishing School: M.O.L.D. / Bioindicator Workshop More Info

July 24
Jill Leovy: The Homicide Report More Info

July 17
Douglas McCulloh & D.J. Waldie: Dream Street More Info

July 10
Deborah Kane: A Facebook For Food as Local Goes Online: Getting Regional Food to Market With FoodHub More Info

June 2009
June 26
Kevin Kuzma: Edendale: Where the Hollywood Film Industry Was Born More Info

June 19
Wouter Osterholt & Elke Uitentuis: Untitled More Info

June 12
League of Imaginary Scientists: In League With Imaginary Science More Info

June 5
Riccarlo Porter: How-to For Economic Dilemmas More Info

May 2009
May 29
Victoria Yust and Ian McIlvaine: Old Ideas that should be new again...and other dreams for L.A. More Info

May 22
Kim Stringfellow & Chris Carraher: Jackrabbit Homestead More Info

May 15
Jim Heimann: Tijuana: A Secret History (1915-1960) More Info

May 8
Jeremy Pal: Climate Change Impacts on Water Resources, Agriculture, and Extreme Events More Info

April 2009
April 24
John Malpede & Susan Gray: Skid Row History Museum More Info

April 17
Frank van de Ven & Victoria Looseleaf: Corpus Criticus: Bodies on Words - Words on Bodies More Info

April 10
Bill Deverell: Little Girl Lost: The Kathy Fiscus Tragedy and Modern California More Info

April 3
Sandow Birk: Dante's Inferno More Info


March 2009
March 27
Mayisha Akbar & Judith Hopkins: Horse Lovers Summit: Compton Jr. Posse + Taking the Reigns More Info

March 20

Christina Ulke: I Love to We More Info + VIDEO

March 13
Karen Mack: Trekking Los Angeles: Local Adventures in a Global City More Info + VIDEO

March 6
Fiamma Montemezolo + Rene Peralta + Bill Kelley, Jr.: This is Tijuana More Info

February 2009
February 27, 5-9pm
Public Forum on Water Issues: Amy Luers, Brenda Rashleigh, Charles Hernick, Betsy Herbert
Co-Sponsored by the Robert & Patricia Switzer Foundation and the Environmental Leadership Program More Info

February 20
Edgar Arceneaux: Watts House Project More Info+ VIDEO

February 13
Optimists' Breakfast: Ed Reyes, Tom LaBonge, Deborah Szekely, Samuel Hoi, Richard Montoya, Cindi Alvitre; w/ Michael Alexander, Yuko Babu, James Burks, Carine Fabius, George Yu More Info

February 6
Chris Carlsson: Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-lot Gardeners are Inventing the Future Today More Info
+ VIDEO

January 2009
January 30
100TH ANNIVERSARY SALON
Helen Mayer Harrison & Newton Harrison: Four Works on the Culture of Extraction More Info + VIDEO

January 23
Joel Reynolds: Whales, Dolphins and the U.S. Navy More Info

January 16
Anna Cummins & Marcus Eriksen: JunkRaft More Info

January 9
William Bowling & Christina Walsh: Rocketdyne and the LA River More Info

 



 

Seeds Saving @ Farmlab
November 25 - December 6, 2008



Next week the Farmlab team will be harvesting many of the seeds grown in the circle of marigolds we call the Anabolic Monument. Over the past year, the team has cultivated several edible plant species from seeds rescued from the South Central Farm. Specifically these are, Quelite, Quintonile, Tlapanche, Alfalfa, Red Amaranth and many varieties of Marigolds.

Farmlab is putting out a call to any of you who are interested in helping to hand-harvest these seeds during the coming two weeks. We will compensate you with tasty refreshing beverages while you work and your pick of seeds to take home and spread the gene pool.

If interested please visit Farmlab, email, or call and ask for Olivia Chumacero or Jaime Lopez.

Olivia Chumacero
E-mail: [email protected]
Tel: (323)226-1158 x5108

Jaime Lopez Wolters
Farmlab Agriculturist
E-mail: [email protected]
Tel: (323)226-1158 x5110

Farmlab photo by Sarah McCabe

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Farmlab Public Salon
Friday, November 21, 2008 @ Noon
Free Admission

Paiute-Shoshone Traditions


Dave Rambeau and Ray Hunter are members of the Paiute-Shoshone Nation from Lone Pine California. Mr. Dave Rambeau is the CEO of the United Involvement American Involvement Center in Los Angeles. Dave will be speaking and demonstrating the baskets that were woven by his great grandmother. These family heirlooms are over 100 hundred years old and have a history that has never been told in our educational institutions.

Ray Hunter is a graduate student from UCLA, and currently lives and works in Lone Pine for his community? Ray is a bearer of his tribes' traditions and continues weaving his responsibilities with the tests being encountered due to global warming.He will be speaking about the 67 or so indigenous plants that have been identified in their lands of which the Lone Pine Rezervation is part of. These plants were used for food, medicine, housing and clothing by the Paiute-peoples.

In addition to these various subjects both guests will speak to system that the federal government has created to identify United States Indigenous peoples by a card carrying method.

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Farmlab Public Salon
Amy Pederson + Two Superheroes
Friday, November 14 2008 @ Noon
Free Admission


The Between is Tainted with Strangeness: Superheroes, Zombies and Masked Wrestlers


About the Salon

This lecture will use Freud's concept of the uncanny to examine the political and social implications of doubled forms within contemporary popular culture.

While often disregarded as empty entertainment,superheroes, zombies, and luchas are more than the sum of their parts. The uncanny double has maintained a consistent presence in literature, philosophy, psychology and art from the nineteenth century to the present day, but during certain moments of historical crisis and social instability it has had a heightened influence on culture. In the uncertain space that exists between secret identities and the worlds of the living and the dead, that which is hidden often comes to light. This presentation will examine the way in which these cultural forms allow us to map social anxieties, and produce narratives of power and powerlessness, violence and morality.

About the Salon Presenters

More information about Amy Pederson will be posted soon. More information about the two 'superheroes' who will accompany her may or may not be posted soon.

Dr. Amy Pederson received her Ph.D. in Modern & Contemporary Art History from UCLA and is currently Assistant Professor and Departmental Coordinator at Woodbury University in Burbank, CA. Her doctoral thesis entailed a joint investigation of midcentury modernist painting and criticism, and Golden Age superhero comics from the same period. Her interests include critical theory and contemporary Latin American art and popular culture, as well as zombies.

Jason Keller is an interdisciplinary artist that lives and works in downtown Los Angeles. His practice involves working from an idea of aesthetics bound up in a culture of deficit spending. This 'aesthetics of deficit' is not a denunciation of art nor a failed practice but, for him, a re-shaping of practice as a relationship that collapses the distance between aesthetic spaces and credit structures. Born on the cusp of the credit explosion and later crisis of the early eighties, Jason explores this interaction of deficit, credit, and aesthetics as a fundamental constituent not only in art production but as a contemporary translation of those older processes of coming to a sense of self (credit/debt/deficit as faith/guilt/hope). Jason is currently an acting editor of ft.bibles which will be releasing AGO Volume 1 and MP Projects this fall.

"I heard about that 'post-comedian' type, yeah yeah, laughter completes the joke, we all laugh to make sense of stuff. Sure, sure. But I tell jokes because I'm fucking mythological, I'm not funny because I get a lot of laughs, I'm funny because I make them laugh when they absolutely refuse to." - Dave Chappelle's response to a question on the measure of art to heroics.

The work of Douglas Green indulges in a gallows humor that is actually born from an optimistic fascination with art
market returns. The vagaries of the culture game can appear cruel and yet it is the seemingly cold market forces and personal Darwinian realities that provide the sustenance for Douglas' video and performance work. Like any good economist, his practice consists of producing the algorithms that will eventually allow him to forecast his own exchange rate in the symbolic, economic and cultural capital markets. And should the returns on these markets plummet, you will find him creating a metrics by which to measure the effortneeded to maintain his smile through the downturn.

Douglas Green is an interdisciplinary artist/entrepreneur that lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a degree in English from U.C. Riverside and an M.F.A. in Studio Art from U.C. Irvine. Currently, he is an editor for the emerging publishing company F.T. Bibles.

The Green Screen Machine (Arch Villain and formerly Lynne Cheney's personal stylist): The Green Screen Machine is focused on achieving one single goal: to depose the person currently employed as the art buyer and decorator for Allen Greenspan and take his or her place (by any means necessary, of course). Inspired by the aesthetics of Wonder Woman's extraordinary invisible jet, The Green Screen Machine has created an even more magnificent mode of transportation that he has christened The Sea Fairie. It is from within the bowels of this contraption that he is able to launch all manner of attacks
against any that stand in the way of that final epic battle with whomever is currently buying art for the former Chairmen of the Fed. Unfortunately The Sea Fairie serves not only as a weapon of doom but also a prison as The Green Screen Machine can never leave its life sustaining confines due a tragic accident that occurred while testing his nefarious device. But woe betide any that underestimate The Green Screen Machine as the wake of vanquished foes can attest to the dangerous power of The Sea Fairie and the relentless determination of its captain to become THE art procurer to Allen Greenspan.


Photo copyright and courtesy Amy Pederson, 2006

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This Weekend
Oguri + Body Weather Laboratory Performance
Friday + Saturday 11/7+8 @ 8pm

Click Here For More Information

Friday Nov. 7 and Saturday Nov. 8
8:00 pm
At the Metabolic Studio
SPECIAL RECEPTION 6:30PM SATURDAY NIGHT
1745 N. Spring Street #4, Los Angeles, CA 90012
(Same location as Farmlab)

Body Weather Laboratory is not a dance company.
The concept of Body Weather Laboratory:
Body Weather Laboratory participants come from different backgrounds and conduct "body" research from their unique perspective.
The workshop is not a training for the performance.
The workshop is a process of the performance, the performance is a process for the workshop.

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Farmlab In the News:
L.A. Times on the Chora Prints 2008 project; City Dirt on Ag Bins projects

It's been a while since this blog linked out to media mentions about The Studio and its projects. To remedy that oversight, here's a pair of links to recent work.

First, from author Maria Finn, posting to City Dirt: this summary of her visit to Farmlab and to see the Ag Bins on Skid Row and F.L.A.G. and Ag Bin Ramblas projects.

Then, from two weeks back, this Los Angeles Times story about Self-Help Graphics, which includes a discussion of the Chora Prints 2008 project that the Studio put together, which features the efforts of both SHG and La Casa Del Tunel, in Tijuana.

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Metabolic Studio Serves as Polling Place



The Metabolic Studio served on Tuesday, November 4, as an official Los Angeles County polling place.

Doors opened at 6am Tuesday for election officials, and closed at 9pm. Voters from local neighborhoods came during the hours of 7am and 8pm to cast their ballots. Voting took place in the warehouse unit located on Baker Street, just across from the Los Angeles State Historic Park.

The lead election official on-hand told Studio team members, unofficially, that voting was particularly busy. One area voter echoed that, saying she witnessed throughout the day a much larger crowd at the Studio than when voting was held in past years at other nearby locations.

(This was of course consistent with high levels of voting across L.A. County.)

Other voters yesterday offered a different observation upon arriving: relief that they made it to this location with the confusing "N. Spring Street" address -- visitors continue to question why the Studio's given post office address isn't on "Baker Street."

One frustrated phone caller spent fifteen minutes on the phone with a Studio staffer, getting directions, turn-by-turn, until her eventual -- and frustrated -- arrival. "I never should have moved away from the beach," the voter said.

This is the first time that The Studio has served as a polling place, but not the last. The City of Los Angeles has already requested the use of the location for the March, 2009 primary election, and the May, 2009 primary election.

The Chora exhibition, housed on the other side of the parking garage, was closed and locked from the evening of 10/31 through today, 11/5/08. A County site inspector stopped by Monday, 11/3 to make sure all was in order at the location.

Farmlab video

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Farmlab Is A Polling Place Today

How To Find Farmlab

Farmlab is located near downtown Los Angeles, between Chinatown and Lincoln Heights neighborhoods.

Farmlab is immediately adjacent to all of the following landmarks: the Los Angeles River and railroad tracks, the Spring Street Bridge, and the Los Angeles State Historic Park.

Farmlab's address is:

1745 N. Spring Street #4
Los Angeles, CA 90012

We're also easily accessible off of Baker Street, which is just off of N. Spring Street.

Click here for more information about how to drive to Farmlab.

A parking garage here fits about 20 vehicles; there is also free-of-charge street parking on two sides of the building.

Click here for more information from Metro Trip Planner about how to take public transportation to Farmlab.

Farmlab's phone number is 323 226 1158.

See you here for voting.

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Los Angeles State Historic Park Public Discussion To Be Held 11/20/08 By California State Parks & Hargreaves Associates

From the folks at State Parks:

"Please join California State Parks and Hargreaves Associates for a presentation and public discussion regarding the current phase of work.

"Thursday, November 20, 2008 @ 6:30-8:00pm, Los Angeles Conservation Corps Clean + Green Headquarters, 1400 N. Spring Street, LA CA 90012."

And for those new to this blog, please note that:

The Los Angeles State Historic Park is located across the street from Farmlab and Under Spring. The Park was previously the site of the Not A Cornfield project by Lauren Bon, as well as Cornhenge, and F.L.A.G., and La Ofrenda.

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