SITE INSTALLATIONS 1979-1988
WALL EXPOSURE 1978 - Provocative Collaboration Series
1st Street between Bixel and Beaudry Avenues, Los Angeles. Sandblasted retaining wall 15” x 60”. Sponsored by “Art in Public Places,” California Confederation of The Arts, CETA. (Reclaimed in one week) (photos: Grant Rusk)
“Simonian has been stealing out before dawn to either sandblast or paint geometric shapes on walls that read thick with graffiti. Her purpose is to use the language of the art world to obliterate the cuneiform tangle of the barrio. Within days, gangs respond with their own language, their own tools, filling or recovering the spaces she has cleared or covered.” One of the gangs territorial messages reads “Civilization vs. Anarchy”
- Hunter Drohojowska, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, June 20 1982, “Making Art in The M-Zone”
CHECKERED WALL 1980
Hot dog stand at 12th St. between Wall and Maple Streets, Los Angeles. sandblasted 13’x14’ brick wall.
DOUBLE NEGATIVE 1978 - Provocative Collaboration Series
27th St. and Main St, Los Angeles, Enamel paint 20’ x 10’ (two weeks for completion)
BLACK ARCH 1980 - Provocative Collaboration Series
Main and 27th St., Los Angeles, CA, Enamel paint, 10’ x 30. (competed in 3 weeks)
OPEN RECTANGLE 1980 - Provocative Collaboration Series
Black enamel polygons painted over punk scribblings on wall of the Santa Barbara Mission Theatre. Site-specific installation for “Downtown L.A. in Santa Barbra” sponsored by Santa Barbara Museum of Art and University of California, Santa Barbara.
STABLE DRAWING 1981 - Provocative Collaboration Series
Logan Street and 47th St, San Diego, CA. Site-specific installation for “Drawing: Personal Definitions” at San Diego State University. A 10’x10’ x 4’’ thick wall was built and painted black with spray painted vessel closing off one end of an abandoned graffiti covered structure.
Anticipating vandalism in the form of graffiti, the artist was shocked to see total destruction of the artwork. All of the pieces were found, and the vessel was reconstructed in time to be included in the drawing show at San Diego State University. The piece was exhibited at the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art, purchased by Eli Broad and ultimately donated to the Orange County Museum of Art in Orange County, California.
INVERTED PYRAMID 1981
“Streetworks” sponsored by Washington Project for the Arts (WPA). 14th and Chapin Streets NW, DC. Site of market torched during the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Spray paint and black enamel on retaining wall (photo: Mark Guilezian)
MODERN EXCAVATION 1984
PS1 Art and Urban Resources, (currently PS1/MoMa), Excavation by sandblasting. (photo: Dee Gorton)
At PS1 the peeling walls are seen as repository of richness of the past. Simonian organized the deterioration by sandblasting a checkerboard pattern on the building that is itself is recycled structure.
VILLA SAN ITTA 1988
A faux Palladian façade (10’ x 15’ x 1’) was cast in solid concrete with wooden shuttered doors, affixed to the front of two Port-O-San facilities. Sponsored by Creative Time, “Art on The Beach” Hunter's Point L.I.C., NY.
Each year the non-profit art organization CREATIVE TIME, invites eight artists to build large-scale temporary artworks. For this commission a sculpture was designed that used the temporary toilets that are traditionally provided at the site. (video by Ante Bozanich, music by The Ordinaires)
CARPET TAR PIT 1980
Truax Air Field (abandoned), Madison, Wisconsin. Site installation for “The New Art of Downtown Los Angeles” exhibition at Madison Art Center.
Referencing the famous La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, a tar pit was created on the remains of a building foundation near Truax Air Field. Like a page out of the past, artifacts of home life in 1960’s style were sunk into a deceptively shallow pool of tar.
RECONSTRUCTED FREEWAY VESSEL 1982
A vessel constructed from cutouts from 3 walls was installed in an abandoned house in a corridor of tract housing in Lynwood, CA. “Transitional Use”, sponsored by FAR/Foundation for Art Resources, Inc. The neighborhood was slated for construction of the Century Freeway but had been left abandoned and in decay for more than a decade. The project was never completed and the neighborhood was left forgotten in frozen disarray, as a contemporary Pompeii.
TALKIN’ TRASH 1994 The shortest distance between two points is a string and a pair of time cans
Long Island University, Brooklyn. Sponsored by The Sculpture Center, NY.
Site-specific sculptures by 6 artists responded to the challenges of an urban environment. A discrete communication system was created in Takin’ Trash using 2 trash receptacles connected by a buried piece of PVC pipe 10 yards away. The hollow tube enables people sitting with their backs to each other on opposite corners of the park to have a private conversation.
Ms. Simonian's low-tech, radically anti-monumental mode could easily become precious, but it represents one of contemporary art's distinctive formal contributions: it is a sculpture of the inconspicuous and the physically inconsequential, requiring viewers' patience but rewarding it with an intimacy seldom associated with public work. -Holland Cotter