CULVER CITY.- Christopher Grimes Projects shared images of Veronika Kellndorfer’s Succulent Screen, a site-specific work commissioned for the newly constructed Brick & Machine building in Culver City.

Succulent Screen extends over the entire glass facade becoming an essential part of the building, integrated into the structure. Spanning from the ground floor entrance to the top floor, this photographic glass image merges with the facade: a juxtaposition of plants in relation to the geometric architecture of the rectangular window mullions. The seasonal altitudes of the sun project varying reflections on the adjacent walls.




The image–photographed from within the Freeman House in Los Angeles during Kellndorfer’s residency at Villa Aurora–shows a window through which one can see colossal vertical succulents pressing against the thin membrane of glass partially obstructing the urban Southern California landscape. The fragile mullions provide a horizontal structure to a perspective of layered urban elements along Highland Avenue. In this motif, Kellndorfer’s affinity for Californian modernist architecture merges with its special relation to nature, the blurring boundaries between inside and outside, and the Californian light.

These structure-giving building materials alongside the succulents transform into lines and frames, revealing diagrammatic ordering complexes that mediate between interior and exterior, architecture and vegetation, culture and nature while adhering to the conventions of a minimalist formal language. What kind of boundary can glass be? The work visualizes the confrontation between an untamed, wild vegetation outside and a sheltered, protected interior. When the primeval-looking cactus shoots threaten to overwhelm the facade of slatted windows, the delicate border between the here and now of apparent reality and the exterior fictionalized by the glass becomes palpable.

Throughout the course of a day, the work reveals itself differently depending on changes of light; the effects of natural and artificial light. Kellndorfer’s work doesn’t have a static aspect and changes according to the viewpoint of the observer, whether the viewer is inside or outside the building, whether they are close or viewing it from a distance. Scale is an important aspect of this work. The succulent’s size is exaggerated and gains an architectural dimension in relation to the existing structure and the viewer's perspective.