FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Press contacts: Katie Klapper (323) 874-9667 [email protected] Anthony Carfello (323) 651-1510 [email protected] MAK Center for Art and Architecture presents A LITTLE JOY OF A BUNGALOW Installations and opera at the Schindler House highlight Pauline Schindler's legacy Opera: Sunday, October 13, 4:30 PM Exhibition opens: Wednesday, October 16, 7-9 PM Exhibition on view: October 17, 2013 - January 5, 2014 (West Hollywood, September 23, 2013) In an early letter, Pauline Schindler wrote, "One of my dreams, Mother, is to have, some day, a little joy of a bungalow, on the edge of the woods and mountains near a crowded city, which shall be open just as some people's hearts are open, to friends of all classes and types..." Pauline realized that dream with her marriage to architect Rudolph Schindler. Together they built the 1922 home that would come to be known as the Schindler House, a modernist landmark. Pauline's radical social ideas informed its design as a live/work space for two couples, and Los Angeles' artistic and political avant-garde flocked to her salons for decades. The MAK Center for Art and Architecture was conceived in this spirit. A Little Joy of a Bungalow is a program of site-specific installations and a single afternoon chamber opera, each examining the experience of the Schindler House through Pauline Schindler's biography and legacy. Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena's opera event will take place throughout the Schindler House and gardens on Sunday, October 13 at 4:30 PM. The second phase of A Little Joy will then feature a newly-installed exhibition of works by Molly Corey and Andrea Lenardin-Madden opening to the public on October 16, 2013 at 7 PM, and on view through January 5, 2014. In Letter from an Unknown Woman, Molly Corey seeks to uncover the contributions of the proverbial "woman behind the man." Intended as an oblique feminist interrogation of the Schindler House, Corey's installation engages both the home's structure and Pauline's passionate, politically engaged voice. Pauline was the source of the revolutionary ideas that underpin Schindler's design; the home is a product of his forms and her words. To demonstrate Pauline's domestication of the space, Corey sets her project in the Chace wing of the house where Pauline spent the majority of her years. In the first room, a projection offers slow sweeping images of the empty home. In the second, visitors are invited to sit on a reproduction Schindler couch upholstered in fabric with visual motifs derived from Schindler's designs and Pauline's letters. An auditory track of Pauline's letters read aloud suffuses both spaces. Extruded from the negative space defined by the architecture of the Schindler house, Andrea Lenardin-Madden's looking west facing east, is a installation of three light pieces is positioned in the original Pauline Schindler studio. Reflecting on a romanticized past and gazing into an unknowable future, each side of the dual faced light units has its distinct hue and luminescence, creating a fissure and projection at once. With Pauline, architects Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena probe the personal and professional experiences that are as much a part of the history of the Schindler House as its design and construction. Throughout the making and breaking of friendships, relationships with clients, and the dissolution of the Schindlers' marriage, performance and music remained a constant in their lives. Pauline's letters include correspondence with a number of musical luminaries, among them Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Henry Cowell and John Cage. In their chamber opera, Escher and GuneWardena plan to draw on passages by a number of these composers-either as inspiration or direct quotation-and weave them together with texts from the Schindler Archive. Collaborators for Pauline are musicians Aniela Perry (cello, music director), Traci Esslinger (piano) and Sarah Wass (flute) of the trio Sometet. Mezzo- sopranoArgenta Walther plays the role of Pauline Schindler and tenor Charles Lane plays Rudolph Schindler and John Cage. A single performance of the opera will be staged in the house and gardens at 4:30 PM on Sunday, October 13, prior to the installations from Corey and Lenardin- Madden. The audience will experience the space and sound of the Schindler House as the musicians move through and activate various parts of the historic building. Admission for Pauline is $20 general/$12 Friends of the MAK Center. ------ A Little Joy of a Bungalow is part of the ongoing series, Schindler Lab. Every year the MAK Center welcomes many visitors who often ask detailed questions about the Schindler House. Prompted by their curiosity, the MAK Center has developedSchindler Lab as a way for architects and artists to offer alternate views and didactic discussion of Schindler's design logic and methods. With Schindler Lab, the MAK Center encourages physical realizations in the space that both respect this achievement of historic preservation, and open the House to new perspectives not yet put into play over the site's 90-year history. ------ ARTIST AND ARCHITECT BIOGRAPHIES Molly Corey's work examines the malleability of memory and the way history is interpreted, revised, and received. Her art is driven by history: art history, social history, political history and personal history. Through the use of photography, film, video, sculpture and installation her work investigates the political implications of images, the contradictions found in representation and the slipperiness of "truth and history." She has most recently exhibited her multimedia installation, Live Like Him!, in the emerging artist solo series at University of California, Irvine's Room Gallery. She has shown The Dome Project at The Project in New York, Occidental College in Los Angeles and the UAG in Irvine. Her writings have been published in ArtUs and the Trenchart Casement Series. She is currently the Board President of Les Figues Press, a non-profit alternative literary publisher. Corey received a BA in anthropology and photography from the University California at Santa Cruz, a MFA from Otis College of Art and Design and a MA from UCLA's Critical and Curatorial Studies program. She currently teaches at Loyola Marymount University and University of Southern California. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Andrea Lenadin-Madden's approach to architecture and design is influenced by growing up in Vienna, where culture and the arts are a prominent part of the daily discourse. While she values tradition, she has a keen desire for experimentation and innovation. It is the interplay between these paradoxical inspirations whereby she finds her own creative integrity, and what gives her work its potency and verve. Her education in architecture, supplemented by professional studies in graphic design, industrial design and fashion, characterize her as a "Renaissance" woman, who is not only qualified but actively seeking projects that engage her multidisciplinary capabilities. Challenging the generic, and infusing artfulness into the mundane, Andrea's open minded, playful approach enables her to conjure up unique design solutions executed with rigor and wit. Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena Escher GuneWardena's work, published and exhibited internationally, has received numerous awards. Located in the United States, Canada, and Europe, their projects range from small, conceptually rigorous projects to ecologically and socially pioneering urban design proposals; from working with contemporary art to architectural history; from innovative residential projects to corporate headquarters. Understanding design as a collaborative process, they routinely work with internationally known contemporary artists, thinkers and consultants, as well as art institutions. Interest and research in history of architecture has led to projects such as the restoration of the A. Quincy Jones Tyre Residence (1954), the restoration of John Lautner's Chemosphere (1960) in Los Angeles for the German publisher Benedikt Taschen and the on-going restoration of the Charles and Ray Eames house (1949) in collaboration with the Eames Foundation and the Getty Conservation Institute. The firm's interest in contemporary art has led to various art-related projects and collaborations with artists. The new Blum & Poe gallery in Los Angeles joins the list of such work, including numerous installations for Sharon Lockhart (SFMOMA; LACMA; MCA Chicago; Sala Rekalde, Bilbao; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Secession, Vienna, the Colby Museum of Art and others), Olafur Eliasson (the first project of Emi Fontana Gallery's 2005 West of Rome series, installed at the Escher GuneWardena designed Jamie Residence), Mike Kelley (Sculpture Projects Muenster 07), and Stephen Prina (Secession Vienna and LACMA). Major exhibitions designed by Escher GuneWardena include: Life on Mars, the 2008 55th Carnegie International(Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh); Living Flowers: Ikebana and Contemporary Art (Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles) and Between Earth and Heaven: the Architecture of John Lautner (The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; co-curated by Frank Escher and Nicholas Olsberg). In fall of 2009, Escher and GuneWardena curated and designed the exhibition Folly - The View from Nowhere at MOCA Los Angeles' Pacific Design Center Space. They were participants inSHOWDOWN! at the Schindler House in Fall 2004, and were involved with producingFlowers for Pauline - An Ikebana Happening at the Schindler House in April 2012. Escher GuneWardena were one of six architectural firms included in the 2003 National Design Triennial, an overview of current American design. In 2007 they were among a select international group of architects invited to participate in the exhibition OPEN HOUSE: Intelligent Living by Design, organized jointly by the Vitra Design Museum (Weil am Rhein, Germany) and Art Center College of Design (Pasadena) to explore the topic of the future house in relation to digital technologies. Frank Escher grew up in Switzerland and studied Architecture at the ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule) Zürich.