Peter Culley in WUHO group show

September 9th, 2017: Hollywood, CA

Peter Culley's work: "WHY BRAD SAID GOODBYE… studio still from The Double Cube Semi-Reflective Banqueting Room for a Ubiquitous Celebrity" is featured in A 5th Ecology curated by Berenika Boberska and Scrap Marshall, opening tonight at WUHO. The show invites over 25 architects, artists and designers to explore ways in which Reyner Banham's reading of Los Angeles can inform our inquiry of the city today. WHY BRAD SAID GOODBYE… studio still from The Double Cube Semi-Reflective Banqueting Room for a Ubiquitous Celebrity Installation by Peter Culley: Semi-reflective plexiglass; digitally printed chairs, wine goblets, and flagons; cotton tablecloth; paper scaled IN-N-OUT Burger wrappers; foam column; resin tracery; Genovese Lady With A Cigarette mural (painted by Nana Tchitchoua) Photograph by Berenika Boberska Celebrity is the 5th Architectural Ecology. It is physical, evidenced in mansion interiors, hotel lobbies, red carpet avenues, and fleeting views on Red Line Tours. Grateful to reality shows and awards ceremonies, it is as strong for those who have never visited the city as it is for the natives. But it is also just an ephemeral mist, hanging above hillsides and particular streets, a possibility, a whiff. Perhaps a desire, possibly a threat. Here, a grand dining room in a home for an indeterminate celebrity is envisaged. It is both minimal - with sleek, shiny materials - but also heavily loaded with old world references formed of foam and plastic. A dinner of locally foraged foods (an early 21st century custom) from the Burbank and Santa Monica hillsides has been served, accompanied by fine wines with the option of IN-N-OUT hamburgers instead. The walls, which offer at once partial privacy and multiple exposure, feature headline texts from various celebrity-focused periodicals collected over a period of 13-years that chart the mythical story of Brad, Angelina and Jenn, presented variously in Islamic, Christian and Buddhist scripture formats. We see a tentative architecture for the nascent form of religion that has no specified deities but many earthly representatives that drift, merging under one denomination, icons together. Peter Culley, 2017