Model Shop @The Window, Curated by Zanna Gilbert

March 8 - April 5, 2025

The Window is located at 1909 7th Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90018 next to David Horvitz's 7th Avenue Garden.
(open all hours)

Opening Saturday, March 8, 12 - 5 pm
2 pm Remarks by Zanna Gilbert and studio walkthrough
3 - 5 pm Reception in the Garden

Also opening March 8 at 7th Avenue Garden: The Stick Show with Melrose Botanical Garden

Closing Saturday, April 5, 4 pm
Krysten Cunningham Informance + Cecilia Vicuña poetry reading in the 7th Avenue Garden
RSVP: Zannazgilbert@gmail.com

Image: CCYoung Studio

Anti-Columns: An Architecture of Soft Forms

In Model Shop, artist Krysten Cunningham presents maquettes of large-scale works in progress. At The Window, an impromptu gallery space run by artist Alex Robbins, the pieces can be viewed by passersby on the street through the building’s window. Both the miniature pieces and the alternative window gallery represent unconventional models of institutionality; they allude to conventional institutions or forms of art and architecture, and yet they exist in critical relation to those traditional forms.

Cunningham’s models are anti-columns that don’t or won’t support anything but themselves. In her totemic forms, the artist winds colorful lengths of hand-painted rope into spheres, then stacks them into vertical columns. The resulting tangle of lines forms a teetering, rising column, while crumbling pedestals tentatively support their bulbous bodies. Other hanging columns are constructed with thin chains and string lines that descend from capitals. Lines of elegant silver, gold and yellow gush downwards. Winched by a pulley, they swirl hypnotic patterns on the ground beneath. Cunningham’s lines trace the borders and outlines of their architectural referent rather than filling them with mass. Her reversal of positive and negative space creates an optical illusion, one that ultimately asks questions about classical architectural forms and the symbols of Western civilization. Released lines fall, compressed lines rise, but none of the lines pretend at monumentality.

Cunningham reflects that her columns “play on materiality, the optics of power, and the rise and fall of empire”. While her cascading columns were inspired by Bernini’s colonnades at St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, Cunningham’s anti-columns present an architecture of soft forms. The cascading columns are a rejoinder to architecture wrought in stone, recasting the rigid matrices of Western classicism in the non-linear cosmos of a wound ball of string, jute or rope. Instead of being institutional, they institute a different concept of structure - one that is porous and open. Her forum reveals what is most fragile now but also proposes another perspective on how the fabric of our institutions is woven.

Woven structures are ubiquitous and indispensable, but their softness and flexibility are never seen as building blocks or markers of civilization. The way Cunningham uses a flexible line recalls artist Cecilia Vicuña’s evocation of the Andean quipu in her own suspended sculptures. Quipus are Incan forms of record keeping constructed with numerous lines of string, and knotted at intervals. Vicuña and Cunningham’s sculptural forms recall an alternative world building based in flexible fiber to challenge a history of hard edges and rigid structures in sculpture and architecture. If patriarchy has framed the way we understand institutions, Cunningham’s anti-columns evoke the possibility of a heterarchy, informed by the lateral linkages of woven fabric.

Cecilia Vicuña’s explorations of textile and line are also present in her poems, which will be read in the 7th Avenue garden as part of the program for this exhibition on April 5. Cunningham will also give an Informance, an ongoing series of participatory artworks based on the structures of weaving. They fuse together conceptual art, craft and therapeutics through a set of guided experiences. The show in The Window proposes a full-scale exhibition to be mounted at a future date.

-Zanna Gilbert

-Zanna Gilbert