How Artist Hector Zamora Built a House on Top of Shopping Carts

The urge to figure out what these forms mean or find something new to do with them is pervasive.

When he returned from his L.A. visit to his studio in São Paulo, Zamora and his assistants, Gustavo Delonero and Henrique Te Winkel, first sought out the right materials. "We researched to find the more standard shopping cart and the more standard plans for a typical building made with the timber stud–frame technique," Zamora says. Then they determined how the frame's base beams would have to intersect with the carts and developed blueprints, "following American standards," Zamora emphasizes, which they then sent to REDCAT.

There, Ian Page, the project's contracted construction manager and an artist himself, worked with two assistants first to find the right carts, all of which had to be relatively uniform in shape and color. "We got the shopping carts from a used shopping–cart dealer," Page says. "I suppose that is a niche market that must have an application beyond art installations."

PHOTO BY SCOTT GROLLER

Hector Zamora's Panglossian Paradigm, now at REDCAT

Location Info

Map

REDCAT: Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater

631 W. Second St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Category: Bars and Clubs

Region: Downtown

Photos

1 user reviews	Write A Review
Save to foursquare

Related Stories

• Relentlessly useless
  August 15, 2013
• We Do Art to Stay Sane
  September 30, 2013
• Artist Fritz Haeg Wants You to Contribute to a Giant Rug
  March 21, 2013
• Michael Asher, Famed CalArts Professor and Conceptual Artist, Honored at Memorial Service
  December 14, 2012
• Hammer Museum's 'Made in L.A.,' the City's First Biennial, Is a Winner, Despite its Vastness
  June 13, 2012

More About

• Hector Zamora
• Stephen Jay Gould
• Richard C. Lewontin
• Ruth Estevez
• Shopping

The base had to be built into the carts, so they removed the necessary number of thin metal bars from the carts' profiles and slid the beams through, then joined them. "Then we had a floor, although it was 2 feet off the ground; we built up from there," Page explains. It took two weeks to finish.

Zamora returned to L.A. during the last week of Paradigm's construction, at which point it would have begun to look like what it was: the empty frame of a structure meant to live on top of many smaller frames meant to shop with, inside a white-walled gallery.

The illogic of this feels slightly hopeful, as if rearranging these things in such an ambitious new way could presage a switch-up in the status quo. Does Zamora see it that way? "Maybe it could be the possibility to redefine the limits of reality," he says. "Maybe the hopefulness is based on the freedom to play with this kind of symbol in a very experimental way. Art is just for that."

PANGLOSSIAN PARADIGM | REDCAT, 631 W. Second St., dwntwn. | Through Sept. 1 | redcat.org