The LADG, First Office, Laurel Broughton/Andrew Kovacs, and Hirsuta: The Kid Gets Out of the Picture

The Kid Gets Out of the Picture is a contemporary update on the aesthetic principles of early 19th century English landscape architecture. By the early-nineteenth century, practitioners of the English picturesque had invented a catalog of objects (follys, ha-has, viewpoints) that worked to produce the pictorial effects of landscape painting within real space. Lumps, clumps, and masses made it possible, in a sense, to occupy the picture.

The Kid Gets Out of the Picture returns to the catalog of nouns developed by the picturesque to ask how these tactics can be deployed in reverse, extracting the qualities of images and literalizing them in the real world.

Co-curated by Materials & Applications and the Los Angeles Design Group, the project is a collaborative installation by LADG, First Office, Laurel Broughton/Andrew Kovacs, and Hirsuta.

On January 7, a new performance by Gwyneth Shanks will take place within the installation. From Above | Looking Down is a series of improvised scores that explore how to move with and through comfort. Drawing upon the performers’ personal histories with their dance and movement practices and our political present, the piece shifts between the kinetic and the metaphoric, the individual and the collective, searching for ways to offer and receive comfort, care, and support. 

The Kid Gets Out of the Picture is supported by The Graham Foundation, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Department of Cultural Affairs, Pasadena Art Alliance, PCL Construction, Gensler, Renegade Flooring, Core Contemporary Homes. Additional in-kind support by University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, Berkeley, The Southern California Institute for Architecture, MUSH Silver Lake, Silverlake Wine, and Hemingway & Sons.