break room
For Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, LACA has created break room, an installation which serves as a public rest area remixed and reshuffled with archival collections. Break room explores how mandated rest time is not for our own recovery. Archival selections here demonstrate how we rupture, break, and temporarily refuse the oppressive conditions imposed on us.
The collection features artists’ live/work conditions, placemaking and collective actions through notes, costume apparel, police reports, nuisance complaints, playlists, group text messages, child care leave requests, love letters, maps to raves, and performance plan sketches. The collections show complicated artistic lives and the ways in which we dream up possibilities of living differently.
Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living at the Hammer Museum
Opening Celebration Saturday, September 30
October 1–December 31, 2023
Details about break room’s public programs over the biennial can be found here.
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The collections at break room are organized into three sections:
The work section contains selections from LIVE/WORK: Artist Studio and Housing Collection, Star Garden Stripper Strike Materials, Private Practices: AAPI Sex Worker and Performance Art collection, Let Go Collection and the MOCA Union Collection.
LIVE/WORK contains ephemera related to artist studio and housing issues, such as studio break-ins, notices and conversations about studio lease terms. Private Practices is co-developed with curator Coco Ono and Sacred Wounds, and it highlights sexual labor and healing-focused celebrations of Asian perspectives through erotic ritual. The collection contains paystubs, apparel, set pieces, police reports, a nuisance lawsuit against an adult business operating in an apartment, and craigslist postings for live/work spaces. The MOCA Union Collection tells the story of the unionizing at MOCA by MOCA workers. These materials include emails, paystubs, firing notices, employment terms and conditions, photos of actions, meetings, text messages about going public, and flyers. Let go is a new open call collection that holds notes, reflections, and messages related to the experience of getting fired or let go from jobs. This collection foregrounds what artists do to care for themselves and how many of us survive the impossibilities of paying for necessities and bills.
The break section contains materials that rupture, negate, and refuse a system that benefits and operates for the wellbeing of only a few. This section will feature new materials around childrearing and caretaking, mental health, and spirituality.
Text “Yes” If Ok highlights the interplay between physical and mental health in art-making and living—a spectrum of emotions that reminds us that healing is not just about overcoming obstacles, but also about cultivating joy together for brief moments of relief. The collection includes playlists capturing moods, collaged recipes, a performance art tour of an OBGYN office, zines that share mental health resources, short essays exploring boundaries, and digital items around self-preservation and vulnerability. The collection addresses the complexity of artists' lives and the challenges of existence as we navigate the intersections of physical and mental health within the context of artmaking.
The Caregiving collection aims to rethink creative life alongside interruption, exhaustion, and joy that comes from caring for the sick, young, and dying. In Caregiving we look at experiences of ambivalence and contradiction, joyousness and fulfillment, and where disenchantment and vulnerability mingle with exquisiteness, tenderness, and connection with new life and death. Materials in the collection include breastfeeding schedules and studio time calendars, diaries, reference books, IVF and abortion paperwork, at-home remedies, cochineal dyed fabrics, medical bills with drawings, photographs of mapping the body, books made from stitches and breastmilk, ceramic tests, deathcare contracts, funeral flyers, oral histories from hospice care, artist estate documents, wills, and notes.
The section will also feature artist books published by Ayin Press, such as Undertorah: An Earth-Based Kabbalah of Dreams, a hybrid work of mystical scholarship combining personal narrative, multi-voiced oral history, and dream interpretation rooted in a group practice.
The pleasure section includes selections from Checking in, a rave and harm reduction collection, the Rail Up collection, Samantha Blake Goodman Collection, and L.Coats Collection, a rave series of free locations in the Los Angeles area. The Checking in collection contains rave care artist books, ticket stubs, Fentanyl test strip brochures, doodles on Narcan packaging, text messages, venmo request collateral, lost and found items, oral histories and journaling related to overdose, loss, and grief, and other materials that offer insight into how we take care of each other on and off of the dance floor. The Rail Up collection features videos from the party series developed by choreographers and artists. The organizers’ work remixes dembow, baile funk, and political speeches together, creating a community club environment. The Samantha Blake Goodman Collection features images and videos exploring pleasure found through movement. The L.Coats Collection features digital flyers that provide coordinates, site histories, and notes of care and caution.
In LACA's break room we gossip, drink, research, and behave disorderly for dreaming and creating. We hope to make the conditions and impossibilities we live and work with more legible. Our aim is that the installation is a reminder that our liberation does not have to be grounded in the evidence found in established archives. We are incomplete, sometimes joyous, and often compromised.
LACA's project at the Hammer is organized by Hailey Loman, Andrew Freire, Nicholas Gaby, Saiga Largaespada, and Keko Jackson.
Editors: Kate Rouhandeh and Hugo Cervantes.
Graphic Design: Hailey Loman, Caleb Miller and Troy Curtis Zaretsky-Kreiner.