text by Hannah Sage Kay
An art deco jail turned squat, turned rave venue, turned arts organization, turned youth boxing club has sat abandoned for the better part of the last half century at 421 N Avenue 19. Broken glass and graffiti mark its facade of 16 pane windows, through which it seems idle riders walking to the bus stop across the street passed the time by throwing rocks. The composition that’s resulted has been documented and recreated by Brody Albert in a series of seven windows cast in white polymer gypsum which now hang across a warm gray wall at Hunter Shaw Fine Art. Supported by the clamps one might expect to find in some archeological display of a looted plinth or section of fresco ripped from its site to instead conjure the aura of times past for museum goers on the other side of the world, the windows on which these sculptures are based possess an indexical relationship with their city: a record of passing time, of resentment for its deplorable public transit, of ghost hunters in search of a troubled past and haunted present, of willful abjection that somehow passes for charm.
Proximity to the divine, the ancient, the supernatural, the famous seems to be a shared aspiration. Los Angeles undoubtedly draws those in search of the latter, and so it is a city marked by mundane lore wherein Hollywood bus tours will show you where celebrity lived, died, ate, and shat. But what about a bus tour for the city’s most desecrated spaces: abandoned buildings, vacant lots, discarded suitcases?
A bird drinks from a small puddle of rainwater on the sunken surface of one such suitcase. Encountered by Albert on a morning walk—recast in epoxy and fiberglass and equipped with a hidden fountain to create a gurgling pool of water—the suitcase now sits at an odd angle on the gallery floor: a bird bath minus the bird. Absenting all signs of life, the suitcase and the windows together posit a future in which the desecrated is all that remains to represent our present—monumentalizing those banalities we try our best to ignore. Will anything else remain of the lives lived on N Avenue 19—except perhaps, the ghosts?
Brody Albert: Empty, Except for the Ghost will be on view at Hunter Shaw Fine Art until December 17.