Sited on the 5th floor of the Pacific Design Center, Excess | Liquidity presents a survey of recent work by experimental architectural practice X|A, exploring liquid form as architectural vocabulary. X|A deploys film-maker’s special effects software to generate architectural form through animated movement and fluid behaviors. Works are exhibited as physical prototypes, drawings, and animations.

Excess | Liquidity also presents a single work entitled “Fair.”  Los Angeles artist Farrah Karapetian responds to the context of Art Los Angeles Contemporary with a text-based piece that presents the word “fair” as a tin casing lit by embedded fluorescents, but without the customary translucent facade of active signage. The piece evokes at once the urban streetscape and late 20th century conceptual art practices.

The title of the disjointed exhibit evokes the contemporary economic context, which affects both art practices and architectural production. Can liquid architecture be understood as a metaphor for the liquidity of global capital? Can conceptual art practices offer a lens to interrogate the formal movements of architectural production? What is fair between art and architecture, between art dealers and art collectors, between excess and its aftermath? These are some of the questions evoked.

Excess | Liquidity opens January 30th with reception 4pm – 7pm.

Excess | Liquidity is partly enabled by a generous donation from Walter McEwen, Jr.

X|A, “Liquid Sphere”, 2010

X|A is an experimental architecture practice founded in New York in 2007 by Erick Cárcamo and Nefeli Chatzimina.  Their expertise is focused on innovative techniques derived from animation software, scripting and continuous academic research.  The principals teach architecture at Columbia University GSAPP, PRATT Institute and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, die Angewandte.

Farrah Karapetian recently completed a residency with the Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War in Los Angeles, where her work dealt with marks of unrest registered on the Western panels of the Berlin Wall. The artist’s work has frequently concerned moments of crisis as they register in architectural space, from foreclosed real estate to the shadows burnt into walls at Hiroshima.  Her process tendentially results in images and forms that are, in the words of LA Times critic Leah Ollman, “more like a metaphor than a record.” Karapetian has exhibited her work in Los Angeles with Sandroni.Rey, at the Aspen Art Museum, and at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Parc Saint-Léger, France, among other locations.

Farrah Karapetian, “Fair”, 2010