MONA KUHN: The Schindler House, A Love Affair
2525 Michigan Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90404
Tuesday, September 17 at 6:00 PM 9:00 PM
Ends Oct 12, 2024
The exhibition consists of photographs, multimedia and sound installation. The enigmatic subject of Kuhn’s solarized pictures is a fictional, ethereal figure inspired by a letter from the architect R.M. Schindler to a mysterious lover. Shot in the 1920s modernist house designed and built by the architect on Kings Road in West Hollywood, Kuhn’s impressionistic photos capture the physical presence of this mysterious woman even as it seems to be dematerializing, resulting in fleeting images that question the very nature of lyrical fiction and photography as a record. The technique of solarization, favored by Kuhn for this body of work, recalls Lee Miller and Man Ray's experimentation in the 1920s, which radically expanded the horizons of photography beyond straight-forward representation. Beyond photography, the exhibition takes the form of large cinematic projections which, choreographed with an original musical score by composer Boris Salchow, underscore the fiction’s spatial and temporal qualities.