The LA Weekly has a nice profile of Mark Allen, the founder of Machine Project, my favorite gallery in Los Angeles.
The Machine obsession was born three years ago, when Allen was looking for a place to live. He saw the space on Alvarado just north of Sunset and rented it on a whim. That's Allen: the guy who goes out hunting for an apartment and comes back with an art gallery. Albeit one the size of your average living room. Simply decorated, with plain white walls. Mucky wood floors and translucent-plastic shoji screens that cut the space in two. Outside: a plain glass storefront window, a metal gate to keep out vandals, and an old television monitor mounted above the door. Sometimes, cryptic graffiti scribblings appear on the glass, a reminder that Echo Park was and still technically is Sureños gang territory. The modesty of the setting contrasts crazily with the loftiness of Allen's ambitions. Machine Project exists at the intersection of art and science — it's Nikola Tesla by way of P.T. Barnum, with a dash of The Anarchist Cookbook.
It's a gallery, but there is no art hanging on the walls. It's a community center, but the "community" has no concrete parameters and is ever shifting. People take classes there — events are often structured around lectures, a setup Allen calls "casual pedagogy" — but it isn't a school. People attend art openings that feel more like intimate house parties, but anybody, literally anybody, is invited to just walk on in. Allen is a collector of people, not artists necessarily, but rather people who have interesting ideas and ways of looking at the world — engineers, chemists, physicists, astronomers, computer geeks, historians, students, teachers, enthusiasts of all kinds. He is also a collector of experiences. Any machine, after all, is a sum of its parts.
Previously on Boing Boing:
• Past events at Machine Project Link
