Artist Patrycja German explored how a performative intervention can transform a space by altering its substance, significance, and social codes. With Reading the Cards, she subtly drafted her audience into becoming active participants in her work and read tarot cards for interested visitors.

Architects Julia Koerner & Adam Vukmanov conducted a topographical and morphological survey of California’s natural and constructed environments in support of their investigation into the ways in which nature orders itself, and their potential architectural applications. Their research yielded Morphology of BIODIVERS[c]ITY California, a multi-morphological sculptural object and 3D simulation that was installed in the Garage Top behind the Mackey Apartments.

Artist Dennis Loesch exhibited the latest rendition of his sculpture series Memory Sticks. These narrow, squared-off wooden sticks, usually over two meters in length, were wrapped in the photographic documentation of cultural events Loesch had either hosted or attended while in Los Angeles, as well as signage and graphics he’d observed. By both displaying and transforming the documentation into a new generation of art object, the sticks became a way for the artist to integrate traces of bygone events into new situations. 

Architect Ivan Niedermair looked at Los Angeles’s restless quest for a resource it can’t produce enough of – water. He focused on Owens Lake, a former source of water overtaken by L.A.’s aqueduct system, and now a dry lakebed that, up until 2001, was the largest single source of particulate matter in the western U.S. The minerals from the lakebed, mixed with water and graphite, form the essential ingredients for a battery. Niedermair conceived a device that used the lakebed as energy source for a long-armed mechanical apparatus that produced pencil drawings of shelters, translating landscape into potential architecture.