Final Projects: Group XLVII

About

Group XLVII is comprised of:
Eva Engelbert
Philipp Timischl
Jenni Tischer

Eva Engelbert learned about Liane Zimbler, Austrian-American architect and interior designer (b. 1892, Přerov (CZ)–d. 1987, Los Angeles), while researching female modernist architects. Fleeing the Nazi invasion, Zimbler moved to Los Angeles in 1938. She soon opened an office and did a considerable amount of lecturing, wrote articles on topics connected with decorating, and regularly took part in design exhibitions.

Engelbert contacted Zimbler’s grandson, Fred Huebscher, who provided her access to the family property and allowed her to use materials from the house before it was sold in January. Inspired by architectural and material fragments left by the architect, Engelbert developed new works. Rings cast in aluminum hold original material samples soon to be held at the International Archive of Women in Architecture at Virginia Tech; Zimbler’s patio bench is given a new substructure, covered in a pattern found under a mattress at the Mackey Apartments. Guests are invited to read a text by Asa Mendelssohn, evoking a sense of the architect, artist, and family in relation to place and sociopolitical context.

Power dynamics are a reoccurring theme in Philipp Timischi’s work, and are often in relation to social classes, queerness, heritage, and the art world. For his residency, the artist set up a studio underneath the Mackey Garage Top to create a series of seven new paintings titled Good Boys. The paintings depict raccoons holding jewelry, inspired by a video of a distressed raccoon watching cotton candy dissolve in water, ultimately learning how to ingest it. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfbb4yRBH64)

Perceptual Screen (Schindler’s Terrace, 4800 Hollywood Blvd, L.A.) is a layered, multidisciplinary installation by Jenni Tischer, in collaboration with Los Angeles-based artists Rand Sevilla and Kayley Saade. The work’s point of departure is the gridded modernist Schindler Terrace, built on the southeastern slope of Olive Hill by architect R.M. Schindler, with help from Richard Neutra in 1925. Now fenced off from public access and in ruinous disrepair, the terrace “once had a pergola above a children’s wading pool on its north end, and a crescent bench with a central fountain on its south.”

Tischer has overlaid her specific material language onto Schindler’s work, revisiting the questions proposed by the terrace, especially those pertaining to what Rosalind Krauss referred to as the grid’s ability to convey “the separation of the perceptual screen from that of the ‘real world.'” By inverting the primary contexts of the Terrace, Tischer proceeds her challenge in diagnosing the sociostructural allegory of the grid, examining its role in architecture and art as a modern myth.

Outdoor concrete blocks are now substituted with fabric and copper, while wood support beams are rendered as wire delineated voids. A hanging fabric banner designed by Rand Sevilla drapes into the referenced space created by the pergola for Terrace attendees. The banner’s imagery conjured red carpet step-and-repeat backdrops and the digital gridding of pixelization, introducing postmillennial interrogations of public space use, private institutional intervention, and analog to digital encoding.

The five silver ear cuffs designed with Kayley Saade operate as satellite interventions that pull the aspects of the wall work into a participatory dimension, investigating concepts surrounding the term “pattern” in relation to the grid and ornaments.