Art + Architecture: Jimenez Lai's 'Beachside Lonelyhearts' at Jai & Jai Gallery

2015-07-08T19:35:00-04:00

“Is there a line between architecture and art?” Sylvia Lavin, the influential architecture critic and scholar, asked Jimenez Lai, the architect-cum-artist, during a “Pillowtalk” reopening of his ongoing exhibit at Jai & Jai Gallery in Los Angeles. It’s a question that hovers over the rest of their open conversation, documented in videos posted below, as well as the show itself.

Beachside Lonelyhearts is the name of Lai’s immersive art installation, but it also encompasses what could be considered a durational performance or an architectural intervention. In fact, it’s a show that seems to inevitably precipitate such reflections about the status and relevance of genre distinctions – in no small part because of the distinction-defying oeuvres of both the artist and the gallery.

On the other hand, it’s an installation that has the capacity to grip you in its dizzying embrace, initiating a momentary lapse into a near-fugue state as you’re overcome by its byzantine array of black lines an...

Christopher Hawthorne on Chris Burden's 'architectural intelligence'

2015-05-12T14:04:00-04:00

The fundamentally architectural character of "Urban Light" -- the artist called it "a building with a roof of light" -- was no anomaly for Burden, who grew up in France and Italy and studied at Pomona College and UC Irvine. Themes connected to architecture and urbanism run through his work, typically with the same wry attitude about the relationship between structure and art-making that the lampposts suggest. “Originally I was going to study architecture,” Burden said at a lecture...in 2003.

The conceptual artist Chris Burden died two days ago at the age of 69.

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Art + Architecture: Jimenez Lai's 'Beachside Lonelyhearts' at Jai & Jai Gallery

Christopher Hawthorne on Chris Burden's 'architectural intelligence'