Hot on the Heels of Love: Sensational Speculations October 26th, 2016
Los Angeles, CA – Jai & Jai Gallery is pleased to present ‘Hot On the Heels of Love: Sensational Speculations’, an installation designed by John Southern. This is the architect’s first solo exhibition with Jai & Jai Gallery.
As you enter the small 350 square foot gallery space at Jai & Jai Gallery you will be met with a row of vitrines that encapsulates the space whereby taking the viewer into a whirlwind walk-through, as if one is part of the space high above the ground.
The skyscraper is a spatial manifestation of the sociological and psychological experiences exacted upon the modern individual within the territory of the contemporary metropolis. It is no longer simply a visual expression of late capital.
If the early modernist skyscraper proposals of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe were attempts at utopian urbanity and aesthetic prowess, then today’s towers reflect a darker, more nihilistic attitude toward spatial democracy. Packed with every experience and function, and produced in almost every shape and material finish imaginable, the contemporary skyscraper has become a disaffected breeding ground for neoliberal proposals, which reject the optimism of the discipline’s postwar engagement with egalitarian social reforms.
‘Hot On the Heels of Love: Sensational Speculations’ presents five polemical stories about the modernist skyscraper and its dystopian adventures within the space of late capital.
Produced by architect John Southern and his firm Urban Operations, the works illustrate the inherent contradictions between the skyscraper as a seductive architectural type and the sinister properties it embodies in regard to the space of the global city. The result is a tactical fiction, which is not an escape from the psychological terrors of the post-9/11 metropolis, but instead a mirror held up to society and writ large.
About the Artist
John Southern is a licensed architect, writer, and educator, practicing in Los Angeles, California. His office, Urban Operations, specializes in tactical design strategies for challenging urban in-fill sites and under-utilized urban spaces. Through its research division, Urbanops.org, the office explores a diverse bandwidth of themes within contemporary discourse and produces publications and installations which explore and critique architecture’s cultural impact upon the built environment. The firm’s research projects and buildings have appeared in exhibitions and publications around the world, including the 2012 Venice Biennale.
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/690569687762920/
Installation Photographs taken by Joshua White
Opening Night Photos by Rheavell Caba
