Set Seen: Pippa Garner's ART-IN-THE-BOX, 2024

For Frieze Los Angeles 2024, Art Production Fund will be presenting the on-site public program ‘Set Seen’, featuring works that speak to constructed environments and how they relate to our perception of reality and understanding of space. These projects are in dialogue with the rich history of set design in Los Angeles and specifically the role that set designers played in camouflaging the former Douglas Aircraft Company factory at Santa Monica Airport. This program is free to the public, and select projects will remain on view through April 7, 2024.

Pippa Garner, ART-IN-THE-BOX, 2024

Wood, acrylic paint… guess what else? 

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

ART-IN-THE-BOX, 2024 is the realization of a public art concept that Garner originally sketched in 1995. In the drawing, Garner described the piece as an “over budget objet d’art shrouded until deficit is paid.” Playing on the cliché that creativity requires “thinking outside the box,” Garner quite literally places her work inside a box, like any mass-produced product found on market shelves. The enclosure features a strategically placed peephole for prying eyes that cannot wait.

ARTIST BIO

Born in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, based in Long Beach, CA.  Pippa Garner has offered deviant solutions to everyday problems for more than five decades. Her diverse body of work spans drawing, mail-order catalogs, classified ads, custom cars, tattoos, garments, and performances on the streets and on television. In the mid-80s, Garner began gender hacking, viewing her body as an appliance that could be altered like a commercial product. Embracing pleasure, kink, and the perversion of mass-produced products, Garner’s work imagines ways to restructure environments, everyday devices, and parodies the contradictions of commodity fetishism from the 1960s to today.