The Shovel of the Garbage Collector

Freedman Fitzpatrick is pleased to present Mathis Altmann’s The Shovel of the Garbage Collector. The exhibition uses double entendre dipped in dark humor to explore the dense correlation between the development and demise of creative space.

Framed by a picturesque Parisian storefront, an imported architectural scale-model cast in LA with Chinese aluminum sits upon German-made steel. The LED descendent of the disco ball flashes. Trending notifications sound the alarm: trade wars are revving. The might of our materiality lies at the heart of our international quibbles.

Nestled between a Stumptown and a Blue Bottle in Downtown LA lies
Alphacast, the last industrial manufacturer on a once ignored track of real estate. Property values are climbing and inside the symbiosis of metals strikes a grotesque chord against neighboring pedigree blends. Our digital sensibilities are confounded by the necessity of raw materials that do not emit delicate aromas. Industry is so last century.

Spatenstich (en. groundbreaking ceremony). A politician poses with a shovel for a photo-op marking a new arts district, a unified area for creative, cognitive laborers. A new international style is rising as cities pumped with digital nomads offload the last century’s utopian concrete buildings. Wework. “The right to be lazy”.

Condos float atop curated design shops bearing LEED stamps of approval. Shab- by chic repurposed wood pairs with slick steel surfaces. “Potency in the wake of its decline”. A messenger caught in the endless schlep, surrounded by aspiratio- nal skyscrapers, ferries himself through Zara’s swift alternative to Balenciaga’s prices.

As the particles of the past clear, hauled off to landfills by day laborers, the new topography destined to deliver creative content at more efficient speeds appears as conspicuously mapped out as a Frankfurt kitchen or a Herman Miller cubicle.

CS defines ‘Garbage in, Garbage out’ as: the quality of the output is dependent on the quality of the input. If the last century’s utopian input is now garbage, where does that leave today’s open-floorplan algorithmic dreams?

The results are TBD, spiraling in the unplanned obsolesce. Let the music play!