Featuring the work of Tanya Brodsky, Sophie Dvořák, Andreas Fogarasi, Thea Moeller, Bianca Pedrina, Ellen Schafer & Marit Wolters MODEST common is proud to present Loose Ends/Unerledigte Dinge, a group exhibition featuring the work of Ellen Schafer, Sophie Dvořák, Tanya Brodsky, Andreas Fogarasi, Marit Wolters, Thea Moeller & Bianca Pedrina. Please join us on Saturday February 3rd from 5-8pm for the opening reception. Always Unfinished: The Space Between Art and Architecture The city is a structure composed out of flows, one built to both harness and exploit them. But this structure is also highly contingent, operating on the edge of containment. It is continually breaking down or dissolving into chaos. This architecture of the jumble, its rhythms coalescing and dissolving into the passing traffic, can nevertheless be productive. Sometimes a chance encounter coalesces forces together, setting everything off in a new direction. The lucky combo that hits the creative payoff. At this moment the whole is greater than the parts, but only in the sense of an aleatory potential, a jackpot mentality where success is fleeting but orgasmic. Put this way it sounds like a creative practice organized around loose ends, putting them together to see what happens, a method for curating the heterogeneous. The city and the exhibition both structure their flows while beckoning to chance, welcoming forces from outside to come and shake the whole thing up. Art and architecture in LA: built on trembling ground and facing a forever sunset. Approached in this way architecture and art operate in similar ways, as open containers oriented around the impending arrival of an aleatory event. Such encounters can change the orientation of the inside, the container allowing the outside to enter in such a way that it can interrogate and change the nature of the space. This then, would be a container that was not built for containment, which is also the best way to describe the architecture of an art space. Similarly, art that takes architecture as its subject or object, such as that in the exhibition Loose Ends/Unerledigte Dinge, proposes a permeable border between the container (architecture) and the contained (art), exploring an open structure that puts artwork and its space in dialogue. Perhaps this conversation is amplified by a gallery space, a blank and often modest container that welcomes all sorts of inhabitants, transforming them, as if by magic, into art. And art, for its part, interrogates this connection, exploring how it can pierce the often self-contained exhibition space and open it onto the outside, onto life in the streets. In Loose Ends/Unerledigte Dinge art and architecture breathe together, a rhythmical exchange contracting and dilating the space, opening and closing its apertures, experimenting with avenues of escape. The exhibition explores this relationship by affirming the unfinished, the maybes, the not yet known and the not clear yet. In short, it investigates with measurements that are not exact, with a rationale that remains a little fuzzy around the edges, with a method that is more or less contingent. Not science, and certainly not engineering, but not exactly well-behaved or self-contained art either. The artworks in Loose Ends/Unerledigte Dinge experiment with the edges of their architectural frame, blurring the gallery’s boundaries, occupying its liminal spaces, ignoring the usual distinctions between what is architecture and what is art. A recursive fractal unfolding on its edges, where what is the container and what its object is permanently up for grabs. Perhaps the exhibition is simply a series of inquiries into (but also against) its own containment. Andreas Fogarasi has compiled a “material library” of tile samples from the offices of LA architects, and displayed them on a specially constructed frame. The transitory nature of the work, its distributed creative process, its literal transfer of material from the world of architecture to that of art, and its neutral presentation that invites a wide range of reactions, means its seemingly coherent structure is based on continual movement. A bit like LA itself. Ellen Schafer stuffs handmade, pink plush stuffed-animals into the space between the walls of the gallery. Resembling the insulation in the walls, the work inhabits the gallery architecture rather than its ‘space’ per se, concealing itself within the exhibition. Like the intimate childhood world this work evokes, its ‘stuffed’ into a hidden crevice and remains for the most part a secret, but when discovered it can change how we see everything else. Sophie Dvořák works with satellite and map footage of LA to reveal the underlying tectonics of the city that we will never be able to experience ourselves. Google maps as our eye-of-God. Laid out like architectural plans, these works put the city’s geographical structures into relation with the reality they both reveal and obscure. Using tar from La Brea, Los Angeles, the artist has cast a slab that actualizes in the dirtiest way possible the virtual information of the maps, encompassing in one work, perhaps, the ideal and the real dimensions of the city. Tanya Brodsky is interested in structures that mark boundaries, in particular those that separate the private and the public. Turning a lock, for example, often allows us this access, and her work evokes and explores this familiar and repeated act. Filled with expectation and possible resistance, with possibility and protection, the lock is the mechanism that blocks or allows passage, neither inside nor outside but the condition of both. Marit Wolters’ work examines an important aspect of LA’s environment, heat. Continually strong sunlight places high demands on building material, which cannot always withstand such extreme conditions. Echoing this fact, Wolters’ wax models of LA's architectural icons melt in the sun, which she then casts in aluminum and positions them dripping down over the gallery's beams. This work reminds us of LA’s continually pre-apocalyptic state, poised on the edge of catastrophe, at once echoing and ordering its impending chaos. Thea Moeller’s work mimics neon tubes, but twists and suspends them in a way more expressive than illuminative. Their sinuous lines seem to both refer to and reject their more utilitarian architectural context, suggesting how art is able to use anything as a found object while also clouding this gesture in artifice. Neither architectural fittings appropriated for an art work, nor art that can also be put to more practical work, Moeller’s sculptures revel in an ambiguous neither/nor that seems to twist all our expectations. Finally, Bianca Pedrina’s large-format photograph focuses on the traces left behind on the walls of buildings by pollution. The photo was taken in Vienna but printed in LA, explicitly materializing the movement of many of the exhibition’s artists. But this vast distance does not register on the level of the microscopic particles featured in the photograph, suggesting a layer of environmental damage that coats the world in its toxic, but nevertheless mysterious, modest beauty. Perhaps this is the perfect summation of the openness of Loose Ends/Unerledigte Dinge, and of LA as well, it brings opposites together while retaining their differences, affirms them in fact, hoping their combination will produce something new, something unexpected that evades the entropy of boredom, or the destruction of entrenched conflicts. The unnoticed ambiguities of loose ends always contain the potential of a creative leap. -Stephen Zepke