Anna Neimark, Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) Design Faculty and co-founder of architecture firm First Office, is presenting Rude forms among us, an architectural installation and exhibition taking place at the SCI-Arc Gallery in Los Angeles.  

The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Frédérique Gaillard, PhD, Curatorial Assistant and Head of the Photo Library at the Natural History Museum in Toulouse, France, the Muséum d’histoire naturelle de Toulouse, and The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Alliance Française de Los Angeles.   

According to exhibition text, the installation offers "a slight release from the present" and will highlight a collection of photographs on loan from the Natural History Museum in Toulouse taken by 19th century photographer Eugène Trutat of the Dolmen de Vaour, a "stone monument" arranged out of four rocky slabs. Inside the exhibition hall, Neimark has created a Dolmen of her own, this one "blank and glossy" rather than sedimentary. 

"It is bigger, darker, greyer, quieter," than Trutat's, Neimark writes, though ultimately not that different: "If only for a moment, the fleeting present and the infinite past sync up. Here, without too many explanations, we happen upon a rude form that brings us to a time that is at some remove from our own."

The text continues: "Its resolution is low, not high. Its joints are butted, not mitered. Its gaps are shimmed, not sculpted. It al­ludes to the architecture of forgotten narratives, eroded tectonics, and mud­dled grammar."

The exhibition opens Friday January 31, 2020. The opening will include a conversation between Neimark and SCI-Arc CEO and director Hernan Diaz Alonso.