For Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum in 2014, I constructed a temporary outdoor structure in my studio yard from modular 4 × 8-foot panels supporting a roof of four brise-soleil (“sun-break”) elements. Using gum-bichromate paints adapted from nineteenth-century photosensitive watercolor processes, I produced large photograms from the shadows cast by sunlight on the walls of the structure. The resulting works, titled After Before Present, recorded both the architecture and the duration of their exposure.
Installed in a windowless gallery at the Hammer Museum, the photograms were arranged according to their original positions within the outdoor structure, reconstructing its interior as a series of side elevations. A second work, Brise Soleil, Made in L.A. (balsa wood, cast dalle de verre glass, hardware), suspended a series of balsa brise-soleil forms that mapped the plan of the original structure at chest height. The lightweight frames were joined and counterbalanced by slabs of colored dalle de verre (slab glass). Together these elements displaced the architecture of the studio into the museum, offering two complementary but incomplete descriptions of the original structure approximately eighteen miles from the site where the photograms were made.
A third component, HowToUCLA, was accessed through QR codes, still relatively uncommon at the time, printed directly on the gallery walls using the same gray vinyl as the museum’s interpretive graphics. The website generated randomly selected titles from a search for the phrase “how to” in the UCLA library catalog, extending the exhibition beyond the gallery while drawing on the institutional context of the Hammer Museum.
