Helmut Weber / Group XIX, Jan 05 - May 05

OPEN HOUSE / OPEN STUDIO

5/13/05 to 5/13/05

MAK Center at the Mackey Apartments, 1137 - 1141 South Cochran Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

Group XIX offered a program of Final Projects multi-media presentations on Friday, May 13, 2005 from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. Presented in the courtyard of the 90% renovated Mackey Apartments, the multi-media installation transformed the building’s rear windows into a screening facility. Newly re-stuccoed and with all new windows, the R.M. Schindler-designed apartment complex lent a fresh, clean-edged ambiance to the evening. The multi-media presentations presented image research gathered throughout the residency and related work-in-progress.

Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber’s “Urban Oil” was a research project consisting of digitally altered imagery with text based on photographic images. “Urban Oil” documented the limited geography of production in the L.A. area. In the current imbalanced economy of the US, production is hidden as the result of an economy driven by consumption, the sustained erosion of the rights of the very people involved in production, and by a masking of the modes and relations of production which renders the global economy placeless and obscure. “Urban Oil” entered into this long debate by proposing that aesthetics are mediated by the social and geopolitical just as the social can be mediated by aesthetics.