Exhibition

  • Environmental Communications: Contact High
    Mark Wasiuta, Marcos Sanchez, and Adam Bandler
    Curators
    LAXART
    Feb 18, 2017 to Apr 01, 2017
  • GRANTEE
    LAXART
    GRANT YEAR
    2017

Environmental Communications, detail of Environmental Communications: Contact High, LAXART, 2017, Los Angeles.

Environmental Communications: Contact High is the first major presentation of the prolific West Coast media collective, Environmental Communications. Formed by a group of young architects, photographers, and psychologists in the late 1960s, Environmental Communications argued that in an era of accelerating image proliferation, university slide libraries were the emerging centers of institutional and pedagogical power. The group’s core members, David Greenberg, Bernard Perloff, Ted Tokio Tanaka, and Roger Mona Webster, speculated that by infiltrating slide libraries with their “environmental photography” they could alter the visual cortex of architecture schools, subvert conventional pedagogy, and spark a revolution in student consciousness.

Mark Wasiuta is a curator, writer, and architect who teaches at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation where he is co-director of the MS degree program Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture. Over the last decade, as director of exhibitions at GSAPP, he has developed a body of research and archival exhibitions that focus on under-examined practices of the postwar period.

Marcos Sánchez is cofounder of the Master of Advanced Architectural Studies at the University of Southern California, where he teaches graduate studios and seminars in the history and theory of architecture.

Adam Bandler is the assistant director of exhibitions and an adjunct assistant professor at GSAPP, Columbia University. He is partner of Rivera & Bandler, a New York-based design office, which recently completed design for Tony Oursler: Imponderable at The Museum of Modern Art and Tony Oursler: The Imponderable Archive at the CCS Bard Galleries. He has collaborated extensively with The International House of Architecture on such projects as Air Manifest: Los Angeles 1955, 1965 at Studio X Istanbul, House Arrest, and Instructions for the Reconstitution of Historical Smog.

Founded in 2005, LAXART's mission is to support contemporary art through exhibitions and related programming. Our audience is defined by its curiosity about anything and everything. Contemporary art assumes many forms. Rather than provide answers, it raises questions. Where art leads, we follow.