ESTATE SALE
A Photography Installation by Job Piston
Villa Madrid, 1332 3⁄4 Miller Drive, Los Angeles

February 26 to March 3, 2024

Estate Sale is a site-specific photography installation staged within Villa Madrid, a 19-unit apartment complex in the Sunset Plaza neighborhood. The show explores the nature of impermanence and memory through landscapes, architectural structures and intimate relationships, challenging photography's to present the familiar in renewed and unexpected ways. Drawing inspiration from estate sales where old items gain new life, the exhibition turns Villa Madrid into a discreet gallery with domestic stylistic pleasures.

The installation showcases photographs captured on expired film or altered in post-production. Unlike popular social media filters, exposed borders and color imbalance bring to light Kodak water markings or the effects of airport security x-ray. Many of the photographs capture spaces typically off-limits to photography, such as unauthorized architectural structures, nudist beaches or intimate pauses between lovers. A pink brutalist beach villa is paired

with its dollhouse replica intruded by the grooves of a Spanish tiled roof. Likewise, nudists are frozen figures on the beaches installed as if splashing just outside the apartments windows. An ancient Parian marble quarry is rumored to be the origin of the Venus di Milo sculpture.

The association between modernist architecture and Villa Madrid, built in 1929, was discovered through the research process. On page 51 of Courtyard Housing in Los Angeles, published by Princeton Architectural Press, a black and white photograph features the artist's living room window in the courtyard of Villa Madrid. Published in 1986, the book documents the emergence of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture in Southern California. Remarkably, the book credits the images to Julius Shulman, renowned for his meticulous documentation of mid-century modernist homes.

Estate Sale opens with a garden staircase from the site of the 1929 World Expo in Spain, mirroringing Villa Madrid’s Mediterranean ambiance. An image of Georg Kolbe’s female bronze figure “Dawn” is enveloped by the Mies van der Rohe Barcelona Pavilion, awakening a sense of solitude and alienation. Illuminated entirely by candlelight installation, the exhibition creates an evocative atmosphere that encourages viewers to connect the historical with the contemporary, and the mythical with the tangible.