storefront: is a project initiated by MOCA Chief Curator Helen Molesworth that invites artists and artist collectives to inhabit the anteroom space of The Marcia Simon Weisman Works on Paper Study Center on the plaza level of MOCA Grand Avenue. It is an opportunity for MOCA to reimagine what it means to be “the artist’s museum” in a city filled with artist-run spaces and initiatives. Following Imitation of Wealth by Noah Davis and Public Fiction’s The Poet and The Critic, and the missing, storefront: Paradise Garage presents a collaborative project by Swiss artist Anina Troesch and Berlin-based artist Renaud Jerez.
Paradise Garage was a gallery founded by artists Liz Craft and Pentti Monkkonen in the garage of their home in Venice, California. During the gallery’s short run between 2012 and 2015, its easygoing ambience was manifest in a free-form program that embraced standard solo and group exhibitions, as well a artist-run textile workshops and the presentation of a faux bodega full of artist-made goods. The gallery was also known for its active exchange with young European artists. While other local exhibition spaces focused on talent drawn from Los Angeles’s many art schools, Paradise Garage took an international approach that synched perfectly with the rise of the city as a global art destination.
In keeping with this emphasis on the international, storefront: Paradise Garage presents the work Stinky. The water is rotten. (2016), by Troesch and Jerez. They transform the window of the storefront: space into an illuminated portal seen in the bulbous eyes of a museum-sized creature. The work plays on the fantastical landscape of downtown LA and captures a fractal-like world of domestic interiors and city streets.
storefront: Paradise Garage is organized by MOCA Senior Curator Bennett Simpson, with Executive Assistant to the Chief Curator Hana Cohn.
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Installation view of Stinky. The water is rotten. by Anina Troesch and Renaud Jerez for storefront: Paradise Garage, July 11–December 18, 2016 at MOCA Grand Avenue, courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, photo by Brian Forrest
storefront: Paradise Garage
Exhibition
![storefront: Paradise Garage](https://www.moca.org/storage/app/uploads/public/579/92f/372/thumb_1618_612_0_0_0_auto.jpg)
Exhibition
On view July 11 – Dec 18
storefront: Paradise Garage
storefront: is a project initiated by MOCA Chief Curator Helen Molesworth that invites artists and artist collectives to inhabit the anteroom space of The Marcia Simon Weisman Works on Paper Study Center on the plaza level of MOCA Grand Avenue. It is an opportunity for MOCA to reimagine what it means to be “the artist’s museum” in a city filled with artist-run spaces and initiatives. Following Imitation of Wealth by Noah Davis and Public Fiction’s The Poet and The Critic, and the missing, storef…