Homatorium III
Lost Horizon

Charlie James Gallery is delighted to present HOMATORIUM III Lost Horizon, the debut Los Angeles solo show of New York-based artist Rebecca Chamberlain.

Following a recent string of site visits to various public housing projects, garden apartments and private homes in and around LA, Chamberlain took her resulting photographs back to New York and began developing the underlying theme for Homatorium III, Lost Horizon. Homatorium (Home/Sanatorium – artist’s coinage) is Chamberlain’s ongoing investigation into architecture’s promise to meet psychological needs for safety, possibility and belonging.

Chamberlain toured an array of LA Modernist residential housing, from Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health and VDL Research House(s), Gregory Ain’s Dunsmuir Flats, John Lautner’s Rainbow House, Rudolph Schindler’s Fitzpatrick-Leland House, and the William Mead Public Housing project in Chinatown. Inspired by a meeting with Barbara Lamprecht (architectural historian and Richard Neutra specialist), Chamberlain observed design details in each of the sites that Neutra described as “biorealism.” Neutra ensured that his homes, when possible, had clear views of the horizon on the surrounding landscape to satisfy an innate evolutionary need for people to orient themselves, to feel secure and calm, to have perspective.

Chamberlain’s work, produced in the spring and summer of 2017, reflects the tumultuous time of its making. At a time when even the most fortunate are looking for a sense of hope, calm and safety, the works in Homatorium III – Lost Horizon reflect an appeal to the humanism and idealism resident in the original houses. The exhibition consists of multi-panel, window-height interior and landscape paintings alongside door-height works on paper. Hanging from aluminum hospital track are custom, translucent lace curtains patterned after “safety paper”—the obscuring designs printed on the insides of security envelopes. Miniature plinth paintings, encased in plexi boxes punctuate the installation as archeological findings.