Exhibition Reception | The Winter Office: #SYNCHRONICITY / The Social Territories of a Warming World

THE WINTER OFFICE: #SYNCHRONICITY
The Social Territories of a Warming World
Exhibition | August 12 – September 14, 2019
Exhibition Reception | Thursday, August 29, 2019 | 6-8 PM
Airport Gallery | 3026 Airport Avenue
Transformations
Exhibition| August 29 – September 28, 2019
Exhibition Reception | Thursday, August 29 | 6 – 8 PM (coinciding with The Winter Office’s exhibition The Social Territories of a Warming World)
Hallway Galleries @ Airport Campus | 3026 Airport Avenue
#SYNCHRONICITY / The Social Territories of a Warming World
Exhibition | August 12 – September 14, 2019
The exhibition in 18th Street’s Airport Gallery explores concepts of mobility and spatial justice within the landscape of Santa Monica and is composed of a series of artworks and proposals generated from The Winter Office’s ongoing artistic research into warming world design. Over six months from April to September 2019, the group has focused on cultural organizations and their urban environment/infrastructure within the Los Angeles Metro area to ask, how much of the city can such organizations transform or develop (beyond climate adaptation), in collaboration with the communities they serve and within the social fabric that surrounds them? The installation, created in dialogue with a concurrent presentation by the collective at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, examines collectivized strategies toward a just, resilient, and pluralistic city that would foster the uses, styles, and forms of mobility that diversify access to a landscape embedded with multiple and varied arts organizations.
The Winter Office is creating new thinking around the local development of cultural institutions and their role in the city of Santa Monica, reflecting a new understanding of the density needed in the LA metropolitan area, in which cultural institutions could play a role; not only as strong and just partners for urban development in the communities they represent, but also as a vector for understanding and promoting new design avenues that mitigate the climate crisis. To this end, the Winter Office has been studying 18th Street Arts Center, its urban surroundings in the Pico Neighborhood and at the Santa Monica Airport, connections, circulation; and has been meeting with various members of the 18th Street community to gain a greater knowledge and understanding of the urban challenges our arts organization faces.
The works in the exhibition include a book of documents comprising a visual analysis of the urban landscape, where suggestions for new connections and ideas for the airport can be explored. In addition, small interventions in the form of artworks and documents will be added throughout the month as part of the exhibition process. Another aspect of the installation is a newly designed table that functions as a temporary recording studio to introduce citizen participation and dialogue as bottom-up forces, potentially driving urban planning. This podcast platform will be a site for broadcast and serve as a gathering point for public conversations established in the conversation series at both the Armory and 18th Street, also titled The Social Territories of a Warming World, which connects directly to the group’s Non-Perfect Dwelling exhibition at the Armory Center for the Arts (on view through Sep. 15).
The conversation program designed by The Winter Office brings together local activists, organizations, institutional and political leaders, artists and academics, among others, to have conversations about non-ideal theories of art, collaborative design, and spatial justice in the 21st century city, especially in relation to new unknown social territories which will be emerging after climate change.
Related Workshop: COAST Bicycle Decorating Workshop
Thursday, August 29, 2019 | 3-5 PM
Main Gallery | 1639 18th Street
On Thursday, August 29, The Winter Office will host a bicycle-decorating workshop in anticipation of Santa Monica’s city-wide COAST Festival in September, in which two miles of city streets are closed to car traffic. The workshop will take place from 3-5 PM at 1639 18th Street in the Main Gallery, and participants are invited to join a group bike ride to the Airport Campus in time for the Exhibition Reception.
Transformations
Exhibition | August 29 – September 28, 201
18th Street Arts Center invites you to the first exhibition in the Hallway Galleries at our new Airport campus. Based on the theme of “transformation,” the exhibition features curated works by the artists who currently make up the community of residents at the airport studios. For this first group exhibition in the Hallway Galleries, 18th Street Arts Center has invited Daniela Lieja, curator at LACE, to co-curate this show along with 18th Street’s Artistic Programs team.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
THE WINTER OFFICE (TWO) is an experimental artistic and professional work group generating advanced design solutions for this century’s challenges of a sustainable urban infrastructure. The group consists of artists, curators, architects, designers, and social scientists, who are either based in or connected to Copenhagen. The Winter Office upholds a creative strategy concerned with blending and defining collaborations between art, architecture, social science and design. As a network and work group it also seeks design challenges in cultural, developmental, educational, and disaster-recovery infrastructure that is needed in urban, suburban, and exurban environments. Drawing on architecture, planning, and social science research, The Winter Office hopes to respond with initiatives that can express themselves both in art and architecture in favor of new uses for social/urban planning and design. To this end, the group seeks to enable the production of final objects, constructions, research and exhibitions to raise the quality of the built environment. The group was founded in 2010 by the American artist Hugo Hopping and the Danish architect/urban planner Johanna Ferrer Guldager.
SUPPORT
The Winter Office’s visiting artist residency and exhibition is made possible by the Danish Arts Foundation and the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support for 18th Street Arts Center’s Commons Lab: Place and Public Life is provided by the California Arts Council, NEA Our Town, and the Santa Monica Cultural Affairs Department.
ACCESSIBILITY
Our gallery and event spaces are fully accessible, with ground level entrances with no steps. Upon requests for assistance, we will make programmatic aspects of our projects available in accessible alternative formats. You can email requests or questions at communications@18thstreet.org.
[image: THE WINTER OFFICE, Vinyl Archaeology, 2019. Work in progress. Photo by THE WINTER OFFICE. Courtesy of the artists. ]