PLEASE DO NOT ENTER PRESENTS

PROJECTION

TIME AND SITE-SPECIFIC INTERVENTION BY VINCENT LAMOUROUX

ON THE SUNSET PACIFIC MOTEL PROPERTY, LOS ANGELES

April 26, 2015-May 10, 2015

Opening Sunday, April 26, 2015 from 3pm-8pm

On April 26, French artist Vincent Lamouroux will transform Silver Lake’s deserted and derelict Sunset Pacific Motel, also known as the “Bates Motel” into a temporary and ephemeral art installation that will radically punctuate the cityscape for two weeks.

An unprecedented public art project for the city of Los Angeles, Projection will be a temporal intervention into an iconic piece of LA’s architectural history and urban lore. Lamouroux will cover the entirety of the building, including its flanking palm trees and billboard, with an opaque white limewash, effectively arresting the structure in a three-dimensional state of simultaneous disappearance, purification and ossification. The large bleached white structure will create a stark visual contrast set against the clear blue Los Angeles sky.

The notorious and famously reprobate “Bates Motel,” whose pseudonym is loaded with references to Hollywood, filmmaking, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, has stood vacant for decades and is ultimately set for demolition. This, and Los Angeles’ state of perpetual cultural revitalization and adaptive change inspired Lamouroux’s timely reinterpretation of the site. Transforming the materiality of the space by petrifying it literally, Lamouroux will visually calcify the structure, inviting an interpretive experience with an impossible point of physical entry. Ultimately, the art- ist will make a ghost of the motel, drawing attention to the vulnerable uncertainty of its much-contested future.

Projection renderings by Vincent Lamouroux

The ecologically safe materials cloaking the building will eventually erode and dissipate in real time as the appearance of the site changes throughout the course of the installation’s finite life span. Just as the Silver Lake neighborhood itself has transformed radically in recent years, and continues to evolve, so too will the artist’s iteration of the motel embody a transformation, surrendering and passage; the white surface of its facade will be a symbolic invitation to project our ideas about both its mythic past and its indeterminate future.

“Los Angeles has become a center for contemporary art and culture, and Silver Lake, home to a growing and active creative community is an important part of that transformation,” said Mayor Eric Garcetti. “The work by Vincent Lamouroux at the Sunset Pacific Motel property is a timely and symbolic gesture to our rich artistic and cultural landscape.”

Nicolas Libert, visionary co-proprietor of Downtown LA’s retail destination for curated culture, Please Do Not Enter, says of the project they have facilitated: “Lamouroux’s Projection immediately touched us. It interrogates the American dream and the mythical qualities of Los Angeles while at the same time revealing the city’s undeniable appeal and potential. Lamouroux’s celebration of this mythic and storied architecture is the greatest and most beautiful gift we could offer the city of Los Angeles and its vibrant, international art scene. Projection represents Please Do Not Enter’s desire and purpose to open an active, cross-cultural, artistic dialogue.”

Vincent Lamouroux’s practice is inextricably bound to the experiential. Engaging the viewer with immersive interruptions of time and space, his works are often minimal and modernist in their visual sophistication, and yet poetic and vulnerable in their appeal to narrative and metaphor. He has created staircases that lead to nowhere, sculptural installations out of air, seismic geometries and undulating floors, all of which force a transition into new physical and sensory realities. By physically disrupting time and space, Lamouroux’s installations create an entirely new realm of sensitization, altering the terms of the known and pushing imaginative impossibilities into the dimension of the real.

Conceived by the artist over a decade ago, and after more than a year of planning, Projection begins its highly anticipated lifespan on April 20th when installation begins. The installation process and completed work will be carefully documented, and will be the subject of several arts education programs in collaboration with Thomas Starr King Middle School, the Silverlake Independent Jewish Community Center and the Lycée International de Los Angeles.

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