Installation view of Lauren Bon and The Metabolic Studio: Bending the River at Pitzer College Art Galleries

Metabolic Studio’s mission is: “Artists Need To Create On The Same Scale That Society Has The Capacity To Destroy”.

Lauren Bon, founder, has a show at Pitzer; here are a few highlights from the write-up in Hyperallergic (link to the full review here):

What attracts me is the dedication to a significant geographical feature that helped define LA, but which has been co-opted and abused and diverted, literally and metaphorically. The exhibit attempts to reclaim the river, but also point us to a wholly new way of thinking about water and people.

“Artist Lauren Bon started working with the Los Angeles River roughly 17 years ago, when she diverted some of its water into an irrigation system that sprouted a 32-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle in Downtown Los Angeles. In 2006, she established The Metabolic Studio alongside the concrete-encased waterway and, with the help of [those] permits, began to physically uproot asphalt and concrete that had paved over native wetland. This project is called Undevelopment One (2006–present) and most of the work in the Bending the River revolves around it.

For the moment, that vision can only be tested on the small scale of Undevelopment One, but Bon’s dense exhibition lays out the possibilities if citizens, rather than the government, owned their own utilities. It sounds farfetched, but the aqueduct that carried the river to Los Angeles was completed barely a century ago. We can’t rewind time, but we can un-develop the land and let the soil breathe.