View the lamp catalogue here.

I’ve never been to an opening where understanding the work itself was easier than getting in. A line wrapping round the block made me think… is this what hype looks like? Or is it the logistical nightmare of a 39 artist group show clashing with building and fire codes? It comes with the (office) territory. 

The crowd of people became an installation for the space, ritualistically anticipating their entrance into the sterile 13,000 sq. ft (3962m.) office building resembling your dentist’s office or your silly 9-5 job. The office building, or what AUTOBODY calls, the capitalist cathedral, is injected with life by way of beautifully crafted lamps. It’s a creative shock for the lifeless building in flux that stands as a testament to the processes of change in this city.   

This show will likely be the most bodies the office will see in a post-covid, work from home era. For better or worse. 

Inside, lamps– light fixtures, sculptures, neon, hybrid lamps– play with both function and ornament. Some lamps leaned toward restraint and a conservative form (Henry Kim’s mongi lamp, Grady Borte’s electric chair, Graham Law’s monolith lamp, Aldrich & Warren’s final sconce, Emily Clayton’s table lamp, etc.) while others leaned toward experimental forms, contours, and materials (Maru Garcia’s SCOBY lamp, Sara Mehrinfar’s beeswax lamp, Cole Slater’s leaf lamp, and Nicolas Riano’s Amapola Pendant). Other works embraced light conceptually rather than directly emitting light (Biraben & Sher's Kaleidoscope, Austin Kahn's Untitled). All of them, however, toyed with the boundary where utility dissolves into art, effectively expressing a freedom of design and material. 

There’s probably a lineage here with Noguchi’s akari (light) fixtures and sculptures being a preeminent example of lamps extending beyond solely function and conversing instead with aesthetics, materials, and the experimentation of traditional form. Casa Ysasy’s, La Esquina made from wood, acrylic, and pre-colonial amatl (tree bark paper) helps us identify this lineage.

Speaking of lineage, just down the street, Chris Burden’s urban lights (LACMA) stand as arguably some of LA’s most famous lamps, icons of public-private light and Instagram. But this show and its lamps are not competing with that icon. Instead it engages with something more subtle: the fabrication of private property, especially commercial space, built up, marketed, leased, and ultimately abandoned.

Lamps illuminate. They light our homes, the streets, the night sky and are the backbone to a particular kind of human labor: the constant, capitalist labor exchange occurring in the office, the Southern California warehouse, and the outsourced call centers that never seem to give up. Light and lamps are built into the machinery of work. (The office light, however, might be more accurately understood as an oppressive variant of the lamp). Despite light and lamps being fundamentally entangled with capitalist labor, the shows works stand in strong opposition to that. Each one is intentionally crafted, hours of labor replacing the anonymous, mass production of light fixtures that power our efficiency-obsessed life and workdays. 

Did I mention the show is in a giant underutilized office?

There’s an odd charm in the space. Something about being able to get lost in the giant, vapid building. If LA will afford us one thing, it is the sprawl and space that seemingly inserts itself in everybody’s interactions with the city. 

Is the novelty and anticipation of the show solely from the space and location? No, the materials and unique lamps are genuinely interesting. The skill and craft of the artists is lasting. Cramped steel and neon decadence (Ginger Quintanilla’s Echo Chamber), experimental, hostile floor lamps, (Santiago-Dieppa’s Lamp, Asher Gillman’s Ladder), and pleasing bedside lamps are great. But amidst a sea of (mostly) static light fixtures, Greg Lewis’ five hour drum performance under a ceiling lamp stands in stark contrast to the other works. It leaves you wanting more out of the static lamps.

Lamps are blunt and to the point. At first it felt difficult to view these objects as works of art especially in the white cube gallery that was retrofitted inside a larger white cube corporate space. Despite this, the artists and their lamps reignite their blunt nature and help us reimagine the mundane into something more pleasant. In a sense, AUTOBODY and the participating artists are continuing a practice of claiming a stake and creating art in spaces that conceptually and practically represent the opposite of expression. 

This show is for all the abandoned office spaces… Pour one out.