Soft Schindler

Curated by Mimi Zeiger
Presented by MAK Center for Art and Architecture
On view at the Schindler House
October 12, 2019–February 16, 2020
Los Angeles

From the curator, Mimi Zeiger:

Soft Schindler participants, through their respective practices and presented works, show the incompleteness of binary ideas in architecture, sculpture, and design-femininity vs. masculinity, inside vs. outside, heavy vs. light, rational vs. emotional-framing such notions outmoded. Each of these practitioners makes non-conforming aesthetics and ideologies manifest in space. Ultimately, Soft Schindler uses the concept of softness to encourage a politics of re-evaluation: If this space/sculpture/material isn’t what was first assumed, what other assumptions need challenging?

Featuring work by: AGENdA agencia de arquitectura (Medellin, Columbia), Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola (Santiago, Chile), Tanya Aguiñiga (Los Angeles), Laurel Consuelo Broughton (Los Angeles), Design, Bitches (Los Angeles,) Sonja Gerdes (Los Angeles and Berlin), Bettina Hubby (Los Angeles), Alice Lang (Los Angeles), Leong Leong (New York), Jorge Otero-Pailos (New York), Anna Puigjaner - MAIO (Barcelona, Spain), and Bryony Roberts (New York)

Hubby on the pillow series:

“I called this series: “The Response to a Hard Edge,” which was literally a response to the research I did on Schindler and his wife Pauline. She painted the walls pink, pillowed the benches, and brought the plants inside - and it remained this way well after their estrangement as they lived together yet apart. She was the soft to his hard, and invited in community, introduced play, and music into the sharper edges of his architecture and his character. They were, for a while, a balance of the feminine and masculine polarites. I made fabrics from vintage photos of their times of harmony of children playing, dinner parties, performances in the garden, and architecture blended with draperies, art, and color.”

Hubby on the relaxation collages:

“Relaxation is a goal for most of us these days in these stimulating times. When someone gives me advice on how I should relax, I think of how I’d rather hear it from an inanimate object than a person—a chair or a pillow, for instance. The weight of the message is softened via humor when relayed by a sofa or an ottoman. When one reads words spoken by upholstery and other cushioned objects, one might be amused. This series of collages is a non-judgemental reminder to do that one thing that is sometimes the hardest to imagine doing - relax! Laughter, or even the slightest grin, sends tonic chemicals through the body, flushing out stress, worry, doubt, or fear and ushering us towards “chill-dom.” I call the series, "Relax, #pillowstellingmetodothings.”

MORE INFORMATION
PRESS: THE ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW
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