HRLA is proud to present My Father’s Side of Home, an installation project by Carmen Argote.

Carmen Argote “Manta” (2014) (image courtesy of the artist)

 

Preview: Nov 14, 12-6

Opening: Nov 15 7PM-10PM

Schedule: Nov 16-22 12PM-7:30PM, with nightly film screenings beginning at 6PM

Closing Event: THE 16 HOUR EXPERIENCE November 22th 7PM – November 23rd 11AM

 

Carmen Argote “Mantas” (2014) Material: Acrylic on Muslin, graphite. Dimensions: each Manta is approximatly 17′ x 18′(image courtesy of the artist)

“I covered the walls and floor of the room I was staying in at Mansion Magnolia with muslin fabric. Muslin fabric being a material that moves through economic classes in Mexico, artisanal and working class. I traced everything that was touching the walls and floor. I painted the fabric and it shrank. The shrinkage revealed to me that the work was about being derived from something but no longer fitting it, it visually captured my father’s experience of wanting to return to Mexico, doing so, and no longer fitting in. The work also resembled his early architectural in-plan drawings. For the exhibition My father’s side of Home, I showed the muslin fabrics as they were, forming the room space that they were made in. In Los Angeles, this action is one that looks back upon my father’s experience. His architectural in-plan drawings, in reverse.”

Carmen Argote “Pool” (2014) (images courtesy the artist)

“This work shows the pool that my father would point to when, as a child, I would say that I wanted a pool. My father would respond with, “there’s a pool waiting for you in Guadalajara.” The idea of another life, another me, living out daily rituals with different surroundings has continued to linger with me. The longing my father felt to return to the Guadalajara he left, became my longing to also be there, and here, simultaneously. The frame that holds the pool reminded me of the neoclassical architecture that I would see in our family owned events venue Mansion Magnolia. Both Mansion Magnolia and the Condominio Oxford lot were the places I remember going to while we would visit Guadalajara.”

With MY FATHER’S SIDE OF HOME, Carmen Argote shares one result of her process of inhabiting Mansion Magnolia, a neoclassical style mansion built in the early 1900’s that belongs to her family in Guadalajara, Mexico. Argote explores personal history though architecture, using the act of inhabiting as process to investigate both the influence of the spaces that house us and how these spaces shape our notion of home and place. The artist uses memory, touch and intimate histories to explore and understand her own immigrant experience, the experiences of her father, her family, and the experience of the everyday shaped under the constant influence of architecture and history.

 

The installation project is itself inhabited by MY HOME ELECTRICAL a suite of programs curated by Lorena Peña Brita. MY HOME ELECTRICAL attempts to both create a deeper understanding and connection to the exhibition through dialogue and by creating tools for haptic perception that compliment and extend the work through empathy and shared personal histories. MY HOME ELECTRICAL invites the viewers to become participants, working along with the artist and curator to explore the intersections between their own personal history and the structures that house them. Through these activities, we hope to help develop your own awareness between body and structure and between your physical body and the spaces that you mentally inhabit. MY HOME ELECTRICAL includes a nightly program of films that fosters dialogue between the themes inherent in My Father’s side of Home but also opens potential pathways and/or wounds for new growth and development. These films create and explore small traumas between/within architectural spaces, the urban environment, the immigrant experience, our everyday rituals,  and between the voyeuristic nature of the other and ourselves.

 

Film Screenings:

MONDAY 11/17 Arturo Ripstein, LA TIA ALEJANDRA (1 hr. 27 minutes, 1979) Spanish/no subtitles.

For a family with three children, the trauma begins with the arrival of the husband’s elderly aunt into their home. The aunt, a women with a haunting aura and unpredictable humor, who increasingly secludes herself for extended periods of solitude within the family’s home, becomes the suspect of the family’s recent stream of misfortunes.

TUESDAY 11/18  George Melly, THE SECRET LIFE OF EDWARD JAMES (55 minutes, 1975)

George Melly’s 1975 documentary charts James’ eccentric life from his early days at West Dean in West Sussex to his lifelong friendships with Salvador Dali, René Magritte and Leonora Carrington, and finally to Xilitla, his adopted home for the last forty years of his life.

WEDNESDAY 11/19 MY FATHER, THE GENIUS (84 minutes, 2002)  Lucia Small

When Glen Howard Small bequeaths his daughter the task of writing his biography, she answers with a film about his precarious career and thorny private life. At 31, Small, founder of internationally acclaimed Southern California Institute of Architecture, was a rising star. At 61, he can barely pay his bills. The artist explores the tension between her father’s obligations to family and his life-long passion to “save the world” through architecture.

THURSDAY 11/20 KOOLHAAS HOUSELIFE (58 mins 2008) Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine

FRIDAY 11/21 HOME MOVIES from Mansión Mangolia.

SATURDAY 11/22 Mining MoMA’s Documentary Archive: Communication and propaganda films for electronics, from 1915.

 

SATURDAY 11/22 THE 16 HOUR EXPERIENCE — Folding Structures, Storytelling, Tarot Readings

Carmen Argote “16 Hour Experience” (images courtesy the artist)

HRLA opens its doors for an all-night experience which invites the public to join the artist in a range of hands-on activities, storytelling, card readings, and a prolonged collective inhabiting of the gallery after-hours. Once started, the doors will shut and participants will commit to a long duration interaction between each other as a collective and develop through time a new understanding of the space, each other, and the work through the act of collective inhabiting. This intimate art experience is a rare opportunity to realize the fantasy of staying inside after the place closes. For more information about this sleepover, email: info@humanresourcesla.com.

 

Folding Structures

Argote’s installation My Father’s Side of Home is an exercise in folding and unfolding the architectural layout of the spaces we inhabit. Argote works with manta, a staple fabric with a rich tradition and ubiquitous presence in everyday Mexico. Argote’s Mantas are themselves drawings in plan that fold and unfold both physically and mentally. Folding Structures invites participants to collaborate with the artist in the folding, ironing, and pleating of fabric. Through the action of measuring, planning, and constructing cardboard structures that fold the fabric, participants explore both through touch and through context architectural drawing, sculpture and the process of ritual. Through the use of these folding structures, participants are invited into an almost ritualistic experience that hopefully creates connections to memory through repetition and labor, folding and unfolding ideas and possibilities and creating structures conducive to memory and shared histories.

 

Storytelling

Participants are invited to share stories of their father’s side of home. Stories and memories will resurface as we experience long stretches of time together. If architecture is never idle and its effect is a constant, then our prolonged exposure to the white cube will cause many stories to resurface and emerge in our shared inhabitance.

 

Tarot Readings

During the tarot card reading, the gallery and the work within it become a space to commune with psychic energy and for the  experimentation and access to our collective supernatural energy. Through an intuitive tarot card reading, participants will be invited to narrate their own interpretation of the cards to fellow participants, drawing on their own personal histories and experiences. Inherently an extension and a reflection of the self onto another, the electric current that binds us through experience and shared history and shared space will undoubtedly activate the supernatural. Our collective selves will go beyond our own narrated interpretations and reveal electrical connection.

 

KCET’s Artbound on Carmen Argote’s Project:
http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/los-angeles/carmen-argote-migrant-experience.html

Carmen Argote’s Guadalajara Project Website:
http://www.carmenargote.com/guadalajara/