CHRONOLOGY

2024

  • Concrete is Fluid, Getty's PST ART: Art & Science Collide, Honor Fraser Gallery

  • Brackish Water, Getty's PST ART: Art & Science Collide, Cal State Dominguez Hills University Art Gallery

  • The Great Vibration, Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific, Getty's PST ART: Art & Science Collide, Presented by Fulcrum Arts and Chapman University

  • Nature on Notice, Contemporary Art and Ecology, Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, Presented by LACMA, Charles White Elementary School Gallery

  • Summertime, Brand Library and Art Center

  • Conduit, Ontario Museum of History and Art, “Accretion Lab”

2023

  • Desert X 2023, Palm Springs, CA, “The Smallest Sea with the Largest Heart”

  • Underland  at PRJCTLA in downtown Los Angeles, March 2023

2022

  • Singing in Unison, Brooklyn Rail at Industry City, NYC

  • Deep Ecology in the Cognitive Capitalocene, SFSIA 2022 | New York City in collaboration with The Brooklyn Rail
    June 23 – July 1
    https://sfsia.art/2022-new-york-city/2022-nyc-faculty-bios/

  • Bending the River, Pitzer College curated by Robert Crouch and Ciara Ennis, Fall 2022

  • Microgrid installed at PPG, Owens Dry Lake

  • Exhibiting in NL XX LA, An Exhibition Connecting Contemporary Dutch and Los Angeles Art. curated by Frank Taal and Carl Berg, March 5–April 9, 2022

    • The Continent Stripped Bare. Gelatin silver liminal print mounted on Aluminum

  • Exhibiting in MINING PHOTOGRAPHY: THE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT OF IMAGE PRODUCTION at The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G) in Hamburg

    • https://www.mkg-hamburg.de/en/exhibitions/upcoming/mining-photography.html

2021

  • Exhibited in MQ: Exhibition Overground Resistance at frei_raum Q21 exhibition space/MuseumsQuartier Wien in Vienna, Austria

    • https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/312151/mq-exhibition-overground-resistance/

2020

  • Exhibited in DESICCATED CAPITOL at CMAY Gallery in Los Angeles, CA

  • Spoke on February 29 at Art Symposium: Sovereignty Expanded at Pitzer College Art Gallery on the panel: “Decolonizing the Geography of the American West”

  • Exhibited in Heavy Metal at Denk Gallery in Los Angeles, CA

2019

  • Spoke on October 17th at the Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan as a part of the Penny W. Stamps Distinguished speaker series

  • Occupy Colby: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, Year 2 at the Colby Museum of Art

  • Receiving the critical 408 Permit from the Army Corps of Engineers and utilizing Los Angeles’ first private water right, Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio began the implementation phase in the Los Angeles River as a part of Bending the River Back Into the City.

  • “Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy: Mare Nostrum” exhibition at the Collateral Events of the 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia

  • Portable Wetland for Southern California established a system to cleanse salvaged water at an exhibition at Various Small Fires in Los Angeles. After the system was established, Portable Wetland for Southern California was installed at the Anabolic Studio, adjacent to the Los Angeles River, in downtown Los Angeles

  • Anabolic Studio began to transform an industrial yard adjacent the Los Angeles River, by capturing and cleaning captured rain water and utilizing native plants to cleanse the soil

  • Clay discovered at Metabolic Studio’s project site adjacent to the Los Angeles River was processed and made through community workshops into ollas, traditional watd

2018

  • Board of Public Works issued City of Los Angeles approval to Lauren Bon and the Metabolic Studio for access to city land in the Los Angeles River for the Bending the River Back Into the City project

  • 10-year Long Term Water Agreement with Los Angeles State Historic Park was signed, creating a future where the Los Angeles River and its former floodplain will be reconnected

  • Participated in the Art and Politics panel to discuss Bending the River Back Into the City at Art Basel in Basel, Switzerland with Laura Raicovich and Ahmet Ogut

2017

  • “Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy: Occupy Mana” exhibition at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, NJ

  • Published Manifesto for “The River Rail”, a special edition of The Brooklyn Rail

2016

  • The Catch exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. As light will be refracted though the water lens, so too does the sonic experience of The Catch refract the larger work, Bending the River Back into the City. The Catch is part of an increasingly prominent area of the practice that shifts large-scale, functional objects into the abstract by way of sound

  • Hosted Water Conversations, three meetings with the pan-indigenous native community about leveraging a private water right for a future beneficial exchange for the tribal reservations as a part of Bending the River Back into the City

2015

  • As a result of the United Nations visiting Detroit concerning water shut-offs, convened together various choirs of the Detroit community to cut an album in response to those water shut-offs at United Sound Systems Recording Studios, the oldest independent operating recording studio in the US

  • As a part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, Optics Division of Metabolic Studio participated with the Liminal Camera and conducted a photographic survey of the Great Lakes, the largest body of fresh water in the world. This body of work was presented at the exhibition “Liminal Infrastructure” at the Depaul Museum of Art in Chicago, IL

  • Saving the West talk at the Art and the Environment Conference in Reno, Nevada with Helen and Newton Harrison at the Nevada Museum of Art

  • Interceded with the City of Los Angeles’s designs for the Spring Street Bridge expansion over public safety and access concerns. Proposed alternative openings within the concrete footings supporting the expansion to allow for visual continuity and better ease of access and safety

  • Began piercing civil infrastructure with the city approved proposal of water drop shapes in the footings of Spring Street Bridge extension in Los Angeles

  • IOU Theatre, a series of radio plays made from television shows shot in the local region of Owens Valley, performed live and transmitted on internet radio, kppglive.org

2014

  • Applied for and received Los Angeles’s first private water right (Permit #21342) by the California State Water Board. The water right gives access to 106 acre feet of water from the Los Angeles River as a part of Bending the River Back into the City

  • Undevelopment One began a pilot project for regenerating the industrial corridor in downtown Los Angeles, utilizing a portable wetland to cleanse salvaged water and distribute that water onto six sixty-foot diameter circles at the Metabolic studio project site where the long existing concrete tarmac had been removed

  • Research on private water rights led to a proposal for the United Nations, Conventions on the Watershed of the Intermountain West

  • Formed a proposed new country called Rose C.O.W. (Coalition of Watersheds), and issued passports for Rose C.O.W., a country that would be a self-selecting community composed of individuals who place the survival of mother earth as the highest calling

  • Sonic Division of Metabolic Studio begins a weekly jam sessions and the sounds filtered and streamed through the silos at the Pittsburgh Plate and Glass Factory (PPG) on the edge of Owens Dry Lake

2013

  • One Hundred Mules Walking the LA Aqueduct, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power permitted a month-long procession to commemorate the centenary of the opening of the LA Aqueduct along the 240 miles of infrastructure from the Owens valley to downtown Los Angeles

  • Documentation and indexicals of One Hundred Mules Walking the LA Aqueduct exhibited at “After the Aqueduct” exhibition at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE)

2012

  • One Hundred Conversations About Water began as a centenary set of actions on the centenary of the opening of the LA aqueduct action

  • IOU Bread Oven was built from brick clay sourced from Owens Dry Lake and placed in the IOU Garden in Lone Pine, CA for community use

2011

  • Bending the River Back into the City conceived as a result of a brainstorming session about the LA Aqueduct on its centenary on November 5, 2013 with key stakeholders who are still cooperating to make this revision in the Los Angeles River channel so that Los Angeles River wastewater can be reconnected to the Los Angeles State Historic Park

  • Liminal Camera, a camera made from a repurposed shipping container, traveled across the USA as a part of “The Flag Tour” to raise the largest American flag in the world at sites of environmental distress, which included the Owens Dry Lake, World Trade Center on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the Erie Canal, Kodak factory on the day it declared Bankruptcy, and the Washington Mall

  • Silver and Water exhibition of liminal prints made on the “Flag Tour” at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY

2010

  • Strawberry Flag occupied a quadrangle between buildings 205, 208, 209 at the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration campus with an aquaponic strawberry farm in the shape of an American Flag providing occupational training and programming to veterans

  • Built Optics Division’s Liminal Camera from a repurposed shipping container with the intention of reinterpreting photography

2009

  • Established Metabolic Studio to explore self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web 

  • Directed Three Day Shoot Out at the silos of the Pittsburgh Plate and Glass factory (PPG) on the Owens Dry Lake. Pipeline, a handmade film, brought communities together in an immersive environment to explore site specific experimental filmmaking

  • The Owens Valley Dry Lake Bed Glass and Water Citizens Metabolic Orchestra met weekly for three months inside PPG to rehearse “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” on a glass and water harp. This culminated in The Tin Man performance which brought 200 Los Angelenos to the foothills of Mount Whitney in the Owens Valley, where the city of Los Angeles’s water is sourced from

  • Began working with Douglas Lee on sound and vibrational physical manifestations forming the Sonic Division practice at Metabolic Studio

  • Began working with Tristan Duke and Richard Nielsen to make an image of a landscape out of the landscape forming the Optics Division at Metabolic Studio

  • Began cooperative management of Pittsburgh Plate Glass Factory (PPG) with the owner, Owens Valley resident Tani Tatum, a cattle-rancher and former professional golfer

2008

  • IOU Dirt, an organic soil project examined the commons of topsoil in the Owens Valley where water is redirected to be used in the city Los Angeles, 240 miles away

  • Opened the IOU Garden on Main Street in Lone Pine, CA as a community space for growers and gatherings on property owned by the city of Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power

  • Established a weekly growers exchange and the IOU Bank of Trust and Time, exploring alternative currency and time-banking in the Owens Valley

2007

  • Unable to save the South Central Farm (South Los Angeles, 1994-2006), relocated the trees planted on the farm to the Huntington Library and Gardens

  • Bees and Meat exhibition at Ace Gallery in Los Angeles

  • Created Junker Gardens, using junker cars as mobile deployable gardens for use in distressed urban environments in Los Angeles

2006

  • Moved Not A Cornfield remnants to 1745 N Spring Street and initiated Farmlab, an ongoing inquiry to reduce planetary entropy

2006-2013

  • Under Spring created a safe place and community platform that organized meals, performances, and hosted civic and community events in a previously dangerous and derelict urban space under the Spring Street Bridge

  • Anabolic Monument consisted of a large circle of decaying corn bales left over from the Not a Cornfield harvest in 2006. Permitted by the Los Angeles State Historic Park to program activities within the boundaries of this work for the years that the corn bales were disintegrating until 2013

2005

  • Not A Cornfield transformed an abandoned train yard in the historic core of Los Angeles into a 32-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle

2004

  • THING: New Sculpture exhibited at the The Hammer Museum at UCLA

2003

  • The Buffalo Repatriation repatriated buffalo from Catalina Island to their original home in the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota

  • Project Room: Handheld Objects exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (now known as the The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles)

2000

  • “Invisible and Free” exhibition at the Miller Block Gallery in Boston, MA

1999

  • “Releasing Fear” in Belfast, Ireland for the Belfast Children's Festival - Young At Art

1998

  • “Diagrams of Chora” exhibition at the Miller Block Gallery in Boston, MA

1997

  • “From a Distance” exhibition at The Freud Museum, London

1996

  • Began showing at the Danielle Arnaud contemporary art in London

1995

  • Assistant to Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz

1994

  • Set designer for Beckett’s series of one acts at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University

1993

  • Invited by Hong Kong architect Tao Ho to do a collaborative public sculpture in Hong Kong for the groundbreaking of the Landmark site

  • Created Hong Kong to Los Angeles via the Pacific and Hong Kong to Los Angeles via the Atlantic, two bronzes welded on two different ships going to Los Angeles in opposite directions from Hong Kong are patinated by the environmental wear of their respective journeys

1992

  • Signing, signed her name on large pieces of poster board and photographed workers in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, holding the sign in front of civil engineering projects going on in the city

1991

  • Created Anatomy, a human torso out of found objects hung between two olive oil presses

1989

  • Graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Masters of Architecture

  • Awarded runner-up in competition to commemorate Berkeley Free Speech Movement

  • Offering; within a vacated ship building warehouse at Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston, restored the 3-story tall (27 feet) band saw to its original condition

1987

  • Designer of PRO-Peace (People Reaching Out for Peace) encampments; a cross-country (Los Angeles to Washington D.C.) peace march for nuclear disarmament

1984

  • Graduated from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture