Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe, The Double Bind Selections

Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe are best known for their large scale environmental installations and this weekend will be premiering their latest work which uses pieces form the Annable Vale collection. The collected archive, deeply rooted in downtown LA’s history, is an intricate web of time, place, history and art. Pretty fascinating actually, read the full story below and check out the show, organized by Country Club Projects, this Sunday October 2nd from 3:30 pm–6:30 pm at The Standard, Downtown LA, 550 South Flower Street, at 6th Street.

“Between 1956 and 1983, Los Angeles socialite Annabel Vale amassed a vast archive of material focused on a network of subcultures and secret societies scattered throughout California history. Vale’s collection was housed within the Limbourg Arms, a large hotel located at 550 South Flower Street in downtown Los Angeles. Annabel’s husband, Isaac Vale, had purchased the hotel in the 1930s and had designed the space to cater to the set of aristocratic bohemians that were migrating from Western Europe during the rise of Fascism. One of the oldest buildings in Los Angeles, it had at one point in the late nineteenth century housed French social utopian Etienne Cabet and Icaria, the first urban commune. In the 1920s its bar, The Limbourg Inn, was a popular Hollywood watering hole and in the 1940s it became a meeting point for intellectuals such as Theodore Adorno, Max Ernst, and Thomas Mann. Over the years, Isaac Vale accumulated artifacts from a variety of contemporary California subcultures, ranging from Theosophy to Pachucos. The hotel became a sort of ephemeral gallery for his discoveries, curated by Vale himself. Vale died mysteriously at the height of McCarthyism, a time when the culture of the Limbourg became shrouded in paranoia and secrecy. Saddled with an estate of dizzying magnitude, Annabel Vale set forth to make sense of the web of material.” — from the Country Club press release on the show…