Lauren Bon
| Lauren Bon | |
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Lauren Bon (1962) |
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Lauren Bon (born 1962) is an artist who works with architecture, performance, photography, sound, and farming, to create urban, public, and land art projects that she terms "devices of wonder" to galvanize social and political transformation. Based at her Metabolic Studio between Chinatown and Lincoln Heights, her signature works include: Not A Cornfield (2005-2006), which turned a 32-acre brownfield in the historic center of Los Angeles into a State Park; Strawberry Flag (2009-2010), an aquaponic strawberry farm raised at an under-purposed property that was deeded to be a home for veterans in 1888; AgH20 (2007) a 240-mile work that aims at reconnecting Los Angeles with the elements that made it viable historically, both mined from the mountains of the Owens Valley. Her 2017 project, Bending the River Back into the City, utilizes Los Angeles’s first water commons and allows the currency of water to create social capital The Optics and Sonic Divisions of Metabolic Studio have exhibited and performed widely, including at MASS MoCA, MA (2016),George Eastman House, NY (2013), Nevada Art Museum, NV (2014),Hammer Museum, CA (2015), and BBC Radio 3, UK (2014). Bon’s solo exhibitions are Hand Held Objects, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA (2003) and Bees and Meat, at ACE Gallery, CA (2007)
Lauren Bon holds a master’s of architecture from MIT and a BA from Princeton. She trained as a dancer at the Bat-Dor Dance Company, Tel Aviv (1979); the Martha Graham Dance Company, New York (1982); and the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, New York (1985). She also has been personal assistant to Isamu Noguchi (1983–85), and studied with artists Michael Singer (1988 and 1992); Elyn Zimmerman (1992); Magdalena Abakanowicz (1995). Helen and Newton Harrison are mentors and collaborators with Bon. She is also a trustee of the Annenberg Foundation.
In 2005, Lauren Bon created Metabolic Studio. Derived from the Greek word for “change”, "metabolism” is the process that maintains life. In continuous cycles of creation and destruction, metabolism transforms nutrients into energy and form. The actions generated by Metabolic Studio are global in focus and reach: developing new tools for urban living and city planning; inventing novel social practices for political and environmental justice; and directing art practice to engage on the same scale as society’s capacity to destroy. Lauren Bon’s Metabolic Studio is a force for change, showing that another reality is possible and pointing the way new endeavors and practices in an age of economic and environmental scarcity. “ARTISTS NEED TO CREATE AT THE SAME SCALE THAT SOCIETY HAS THE CAPACITY TO DESTROY” proclaims a red neon sign on one wall of the Metabolic Studio in a warehouse on the edge of Chinatown in downtown Los Angeles.
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