Shana Nys DambrotOn the leafy West Hollywood side street of King’s Road, the Schindler House presides as a quiet L.A. treasure, a landmark destination for any aficionado of avant-garde 20th-century architecture. Operated by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, the Schindler House (built 1921-22) plays frequent host to art exhibitions and interdisciplinary cultural events whose occupations make sophisticated use of the building’s signature indoor/outdoor spatial flows and warm, earthy materials.
Credit: Furth Yashar & Open House at the MAK Center
So it is with this month’s fortuitous coincidence of programming — the accidental pairing of “Open House” and Foodshop — a brilliant design exhibition and a farm-to-table curated artisanal dinner and music series. The Foodshop series menu looks cosmically delicious, but then again, viewing “Open House” on its own offers a more meditative, considered encounter with the installation, which itself blurs plenty of boundaries, between motif and function, design and sculpture, and personal and public space.
Credit: Furth Yashar & Open House at the MAK Center
Conceived as a site-specific investigation juxtaposing architectural history with progressive materiality, “Open House” was curated by the powerhouse art-loving design team of Oliver M. Furth & Sean Yashar. They organize pop-ups like these under the name “Furth Yashar &” signalling the improvisational and collaborative nature of their projects — in this case, the heightened contextual presentation of new bodies of work by L.A.-based artist-makers Elyse Graham, Alex Hagentorn, Alex J. Reed, and Jonathan Zawada.
Furth & Yashar see it as an “intervention of emerging, boundary-breaking contemporary work in a home that was meant as an experiment for living.” All their projects revolved around the central idea that the most intriguing design pieces often “straddle fine and decorative art. It is a show,” they write, “that faces head on the sculpture/object divide,” and thereby addresses the same social systems that inspired the building’s architect in his own design investigations.
Credit: Furth Yashar & Open House at the MAK Center
The Schindler House, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, 835 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood; (323) 651-1510, makcenter.org. Wed.-Sun., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; through May 27; $10, free Fri., 4-6 p.m. Foodshop dinners priced separately.
Credit: Furth Yashar & Open House at the MAK Center
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