“The Santee Alley” Group Exhibition, 2019, MAK Center Los Angeles

„Perceptual Screen (Schindler’s Terrace, 4800 Hollywood Blvd, L.A.)“ is a layered, multidisciplinary installation by Jenni Tischer, in collaboration with Los Angeles-based artist Rand Sevilla. The work’s point of departure is the gridded modernist Schindler Terrace, built on the southeastern slope of Olive Hill by architect R.M. Schindler, with help from Richard Neutra in 1925. Now fenced off from public access and in ruinous disrepair, the terrace “once had a pergola above a children’s wading pool on its north end, and a crescent bench with a central fountain on its south.”
Tischer has overlaid her specific material language onto Schindler’s work, revisiting the questions proposed by the terrace, especially those pertaining to what Rosalind Krauss referred to as the grid’s ability to convey “the separation of the perceptual screen from that of the ‘real world.‘” By inverting the primary contexts of the Terrace, Tischer proceeds her challenge in diagnosing the sociostructural allegory of the grid, examining its role in architecture and art as a modern myth.
Outdoor concrete blocks are now substituted with fabric and copper, while wood support beams are rendered as wire delineated voids. A hanging fabric banner designed by Rand Sevilla drapes into the referenced space created by the pergola for Terrace attendees. The banner’s imagery conjured red carpet step-and-repeat backdrops and the digital gridding of pixelization, introducing postmillennial interrogations of public space use, private institutional intervention, and analog to digital encoding.

Curated by: Priscilla Fraser (Director, MAK Center for Art and Architecture) and Anthony Carfello (Deputy Director, MAK Center for Art and Architecture)

Thanks to: Rand Sevilla, Kayley Saade, Christina Saade (Jewelry District Los Angeles)

Photos: Esteban Schimpf