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JONAH FREEMAN + JUSTIN LOWE
The Double Bind: Selections from The Annabel Vale Archive

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Please join us for a reception for the artists
Sunday October 2nd 3:30 pm–6:30 pm
The Standard, Downtown LA
550 South Flower Street, at 6th Street. Los Angeles, CA 90071
Featuring a special performance by RTX

THE ANNABEL VALE ARCHIVE

Between 1956 and 1983, Los Angeles socialite Annabel Vale amassed a vast archive of material focused on a network of subcultures and secret societies scattered throughout California history. Vale's collection was housed within the Limbourg Arms, a large hotel located at 550 South Flower Street in downtown Los Angeles. Annabel's husband, Isaac Vale, had purchased the hotel in the 1930s and had designed the space to cater to the set of aristocratic bohemians that were migrating from Western Europe during the rise of Fascism. One of the oldest buildings in Los Angeles, it had at one point in the late nineteenth century housed French social utopian Etienne Cabet and Icaria, the first urban commune. In the 1920s its bar, The Limbourg Inn, was a popular Hollywood watering hole and in the 1940s it became a meeting point for intellectuals such as Theodore Adorno, Max Ernst, and Thomas Mann. Over the years, Isaac Vale accumulated artifacts from a variety of contemporary California subcultures, ranging from Theosophy to Pachucos. The hotel became a sort of ephemeral gallery for his discoveries, curated by Vale himself. Vale died mysteriously at the height of McCarthyism, a time when the culture of the Limbourg became shrouded in paranoia and secrecy. Saddled with an estate of dizzying magnitude, Annabel Vale set forth to make sense of the web of material.

Annabel saw the archive as a body of conflicting symbols, one that involved both a strong countercultural impulse along with an affirmation of the glory of the western empire. As she poured through the material she began to sense that various artifacts were speaking to one another, forming an overarching narrative of the subterranean history of California. Annabel used the hotel as a place to expand on what her late husband had built and, with feverish intent, attempted to fill the gaps of the nascent picture. In the 1960s, buoyed by the various discussions of conspiracy that were inseparable to the era, she began collecting far more aggressively. Entire rooms of the hotel were taken over for showcasing and storing the archive. Upon her death in 1983 the archive had grown twenty-three times in size and existed as a largely unorganized mass of cultural detritus. Artifacts ranged from countercultural literary magazines to plans for the coming mega-cities of southern California to rare plant/mineral hybrids.

THE DOUBLE BIND

The material in The Annabel Vale Archive still exists in intense disarray. Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe were given limited access to the surviving materials, now housed in a warehouse south of LAX. For the commission in the Lobby of The Standard, Downtown LA, Freeman and Lowe were granted permission to requisition certain elements to integrate into their installation. The Double Bind consists of items directly appropriated from the archives as well as new works in response to the schizophrenic state of the Vale accumulation. The work exists as an ongoing exploration of the maintained fragmentation of the collection despite its dramatic increase in scale.

JONAH FREEMAN AND JUSTIN LOWE

The artists are known for their large-scale environmental installations in which a wide variety of social spaces are rendered in intense sculptural detail. They create labyrinthine sequences of rooms that draw sharp contrasts between style and use. In these works, it would not be uncommon to move from the parlor of an Upper East Side apartment into the pantry of a Hippie commune or Chinese pharmacy. Their first collaborative installation Hello Meth Lab In The Sun (with Alexandre Singh) was commissioned by Ballroom Marfa in 2008. A variation entitled Hello Meth Lab With A View then traveled to The Station in Miami, FL, curated by Shamim Momin and Nate Lowman. Their most expansive installation Black Acid Co-op was installed in 2009 at Deitch Projects, NYC and consisted of a twenty-three room, three story architectural intervention. The most recent project, Bright White Underground, was commissioned by Country Club and installed in R.M. Schindler's Buck House in Hollywood. It involved the reimagining of the history of this famous example of California modernism as the controversial site of psychedelic research.

For additional information please contact:
info@countryclubprojects.com
t +1 323 851 8522

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