Hot Flat

Co-curated with Santi Vernetti

Works by Michael Cataldi, Abigail Collins, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Fleurette West, Richard U. Wheeler

Angels Gate Cultural Center | San Pedro, CA | November 2017

In 1978, Viennese architecture firm Coop Himmelb(l)au proposed designs for a deconstructivist apartment complex with a glass atrium in the shape of a massive, undulating flame. Though it was never erected, its plans called for an edifice that uncannily embraced the sensuousness of human life both inside and outside its walls. The building, called Hot Flat, was to exist as architecture “in the throes,” challenging domestic conventions of stability and privacy and viscerally gesturing toward its own material destruction. By invoking the elemental timelessness of fire, its composition pointed insistently beyond the geographic and temporal specificity of its intended metropolitan context.

Taking Himmelb(l)au’s ambitious project as a point of departure, newly commissioned work by each artist engages modes of sensorial flux between bodies and the physical and social structures that impel their displacements and direct their lines of sight. Reassessing the architectural and environmental context of Angels Gate Cultural Center, which includes a cluster of 1940s-era Army barracks, defunct gun emplacements, and bunker ruins at the peak of Angels Gate Park, these artists’ works locate potentialities in the enduring tensions between imposed architectural or geopolitical lines of demarcation and mutable, entropic forces that undermine them.

Installation images, from top to bottom (all works 2017):

Michael Cataldi, The Night Cleaner

Abigail Collins, Out of Play

Gelare Khoshgozaran, A Petrorhetorical Question

Fleurette West, The Glass Water Mirrored the Flame

Richard U. Wheeler, Assessment and Selection, Phase 1

Photos by Paul Salveson