Metabolic Studio at Printed Matter's LA Art Book Fair
Boxes from the Fault Line
Thursday, May 15 - Sunday, May 18
Join us at the Metabolic Studio Booth: Level 1, D26
Check out the whole LAABF Schedule here
We are not bringing books. We are bringing boxes.
Handmade by artists embedded in Metabolic Studio’s archiving practice, each box contains a collection of ephemera—paper, ash, image, thread—assembled not to explain, but to suggest. These are not records. They are evidence.
The collections are small. What they open onto is not.
Fire. Landslide. Feminist futurism. Analog sound. Each box is a seed, yes—but more precisely, a signal. A dispatch from a studio situated on the Pacific edge of the North American continent, in a city always on the verge of combustion, collapse, or reinvention. This is the terrain we work with: bounded by ocean, by the Sierra and Santa Monica ranges, by the memory of floodplain and forest now paved over and renamed.
The Studio is shaped by this edge condition. So are the boxes. Two hold fire. One holds the slope where the earth moves. Two hold the legacy of feminist and visionary art that flourished precisely because the ground beneath it was unstable. One holds sound—analog, bodily, tuned to living systems.
Together, they form a kind of informal atlas: not of where we’ve been, but of what we’re noticing.
We offer them not as answers, but as openings.
Come. Sit with us on the fault line.
Friday, May 16 at 2pm
Launch of The Fires We Live With — Lauren Bon and Lita Albuquerque in Conversation
Friday, May 16 at 4pm
Launch of Fires of the West — Lauren Bon and Richard Nielsen in Conversation
Saturday, May 17 at 12pm
Launch of Eugenia Perpetua Butler: Documents of Invisibility…Shimmering Between Wondering — Lauren Bon, Carolyne Aycaguer and Corazon del Sol in Conversation
Saturday, May 17 at 2pm
Launch of Life is Abundant — Richard Nielsen and Wendy Isabella Escobar Procopio in Conversation, with Cameraless Photography Demonstration
Sunday, May 18 at 12pm
Launch of Magic Happens: The Woman’s Building — Lauren Bon and Cheri Gaulke in Conversation
Sunday, May 18 at 2pm
Launch of Enchanting the Floodplain — Enchanting the Floodplain with the Après Cristal Baschet, Richard Nielsen and Douglas Lee in Conversation
This is so fascinating a presentation. I will be out of town but I would urge everyone to see this exhibit!