A midcentury modern house in Southern California is purchased for the sole purpose of destruction. An Alpine family vacation home is dismantled brick-by-brick by the daughter of the builder. City blocks crumble and spaces become debris. In one generation, fully formed built environments are supplanted by others. 

Exploring the lines between demolition, transformation, and extinction, this group exhibition engages four artists’ approaches to reckoning psychologically with the erasure of history that comes with the destruction of both iconic and vernacular architecture: Tehran-based artist Nazgol Ansarinia works with the three-dimensional documents of bulldozer-induced change, as interior is forced to exterior. Innsbruck-based artist Margarethe Drexel prepares to disassemble a house in Austria and “inter” it within its own basement, repurposing the house underground as a mausoleum/terrace. Los Angeles-based artist and journalist Lexis-Olivier Ray captures the decisive moment when place is obliterated by real estate. Paris-based artist Yan Tomaszewski psychoanalyzes, through film and sculpture, the demolition of Richard Neutra’s 1962 Maslon House in Rancho Mirage, CA.