7th Ave Garden, L.A.’s urban arts oasis, celebrates its impermanence

It was not easy to classify the work of the conceptual artist in Los Angeles David Horfitz. Over the past two decades, it has been working through the media, from the video to sculpture to existing materials. His last project, 7th Ave Garden, also challenges an easy classification. On a vacant collection at Arlington Heights, he created a small oasis but greenery host exhibitions, hair readings and shows.

Former Washington Street, where a house was burned, Horfitz worked with the Termoto Landscape Engineering Company to build a secret park that also works as a living environmental laboratory and a technical project. Horvitz has a handshake deal with the property owner, who gave him permission to build a garden knowing that a lot can be developed or sold in the future.

Without tightening by the potential hole, Horvitz began to plan the garden. When friends asked about the wisdom of garden cultivation, they may be destroyed to make room for real estate development, Horvitz is aside. “If I have [the garden] Within five years, this tree will be greater than five years and will reach 25 feet long, right? But if I hesitated, nothing will happen. “It is a very optimistic work,” says Horvits.

The director of the Terremoto Kasey Toomey project, who was working in the park, is a large part of his attractiveness. “He forces you to be actively present at the moment. You have to enjoy it while she is there,” explains.

Work in the park began at the same time that the Los Angeles County Museum of Artistic Buildings was demolished on its new campus, which was designed in Peter Zumth, which creates an opportunity to use the museum’s ruins to create a new artwork. Horfitz collected the concrete waste known by ART World Connections.

Other materials found include pieces of flat concrete withdrawn from Ballona Creek to make a corridor, ride from the previous southern farm site, and sand from the Bruce’s Beach’s Bruce website in South Bay.

Some shells full of garden come from Horvitz flights on the beach, while others are oyster tasting parties held in the garden, but most of them were collected from local restaurants such as Mexican seafood restaurant that Michelin star Holbox In southern Los Angeles Mercado de Paluma. The shells serve a double purpose – a functional purpose, as they decompose to improve soil quality, and another official, which reflects the moonlight in the evening.

Small bells and oyster shells from Michelin Star Restaurant in 7th Ave.

(Etienne Laurent/for times)

Horvitz completely realizes that the park has a double presence. “There are two gardens here,” explains. “There is a garden that contains plants and there is a garden that is my artistic work. It has a different way to express and discuss it.”

By working with the Termoto team, Horvitz is planted about 100 original plants, including Elderberry, Sage, Grittlebrush and Manzanitas. In the past few winter heavy rains have helped care for the seeds of scattered wild flower, creating a wonderful explosion of flowers in the spring that attract butterflies and bees into live petals. Horfitz also left some of the indigenous residents in the park, including the rose bush, ors, and the second. Bloomria scraps from his grandmother’s house in the neighborhood were added to the plot.

Sophie Abel reads a poem from the launch event on March 30 at 7th Ave Garden in Los Angeles.

(Etienne Laurent/for times)

Garden design is not the result of an official process and plan. Instead, it was built into the site. “It appeared instead of its design in advance,” explains the director of Termoto David Godshall. After purchasing the original plants, horvitz and the team in Terremoto hosted the day of the mostly instinct plants. “Our design intention was not to develop a plan,” says Godshall.

A wooden platform and seats in the center of the garden act as a pivotal point of performance and events. Horfitz calls on friends, artists and other values ​​to produce exhibitions, events and readings and cooperate with it, with a comfortable approach to programming: it maintains the garden programming informally. There is no official website, news message, or Instagram handle for the garden.

“What I don’t want to happen is to become a full -time job and become a professional,” Horvitz insists. Instead, Horvitz is primarily dependent on an oral word of events, and it will sometimes publish it to Instagram in personal Instagram a day or two before the event. The launching ceremony for a book on March 30 for the “largest cherry pie in the world”, a, recently hosted a A collection of hair By his friend Sophie Abel, who appeared the guitarist and tasting tea. On Saturday at 4 pm, there will be a reading of Cecilia Vicena’s hair in the garden.

LENG Bian plays the guitar during a recent event at 7th Ave Garden in Arlington Heights.

(Etienne Laurent/for times)

While the garden is rooted in local culture, which has been built little by little from Flotsam and Jetsam of Los Angeles Moresses and Plants in the environment, the programming is more universal in the approach. Multi -disciplinary artists Martin Sims and Sophia Clairi I participated in reading hair in the garden. Non -profit public arts based in Los Angeles Active cultures The traditional Chinese tea and mushroom service hosted a ground oven for the barbecue of society with artists Yasmine Ostandorf Rodriguez and Shanuan Manton. Dancing company Volta collective He did the design and performed in the garden.

During the FRIEZE LOS Angeles Arts exhibition in Faris in February, Horvitz was held with the Frac Lorraine Museum. Frac Lorraine features a prominent way with a garden as a living artwork at its location in Metz, France. Horfitz and Vanie Gonella, director of Frac, collaborated at an exhibition that guarantees a work from the Frac Lorraine group including Rosemary Mayer, Lotty Rosenfeld and Mario García Torres. The artwork is primarily concept and performance, and avoiding some of the issues most attached to transportation, storage and insurance most museum loans.

Corita Kent is a reading that reads, “Hope raises nothing else that cannot be passionate about the possible” in the Ave 7 Park.

(Etienne Laurent/for times)

While the Frak lives in the Ave 7th park temporarily, Horvitz contributed to a more permanent artifact in the Frac group through his work “Fleur De Corbeau”. The piece, the Frankbani branch of its former grandmother’s garden in the neighborhood, will be planted in the museum garden, and the time and spatial boundaries between the institution and the artist will be crossed.

The exhibition, titled “Conversations with Ghosts”, included a mural that multiplies details of a piece written by Coreta Kent at the Frac Lorraine collection. Black and bold yellow color coated Kent proverbs On the adjacent wall, “it raises hope because nothing else cannot be passionate about the possible”, still ignores the garden, and it is a specific visual reminder for the park’s purpose.