The Lakota Porch: A Time Traveler
California Pacific Triennial 2017
Orange County Museum of Art
May 6-September 4, 2017
The Lakota Porch: A Time Traveler evokes a Craftsman Vernacular porch built by an Apache Mescalero master stone builder by the name of Dan Montelongo about a 100 years ago. He build many houses in San Fernando, Sylmar, Sunland–his work is preserved in the Stonehurst historic district there–La Crescenta, La Cañada, and Pasadena.
Located inside and outside the home, the porch is both public and private. As part of the Los Angeles Craftsman Vernacular movement, the porch exists both inside and outside modernity. It is linked to the back-to-the-land philosophy that encouraged the construction of buildings with local materials, and also, exhibits an ancient indigenous way of construction with rocks that evokes the foundations of the Templo Mayor built by the Aztecs, the Mayan pyramids, the Inca Temples, and also the Inca aqueduct spirals built in Nazca, among many others.
The Lakota Porch: A Time Traveler is made with stones from another place or time. These stones with sheet metal produced for industrial purposes are brought them back to the earth and to exist as stones. These are rocks from elsewhere, rocks that could very well be remnants of industrialization, rocks from the future. The Lakota Porch: A Time Traveler brings together ideas about time travel, cultural diversity and coexistence, labor, the transformative life of a city, and the power of imagining another possible future. It is a porch has come full circle and has crossed lines defined by class, by race, by colonial policies, by histories of gentrification, marginalization, exclusion. As a result, this house is now located in a working class neighborhood somewhere in Los Angeles, and is inhabited in contemporary times by a Lakota woman.
BEATRIZ CORTEZ 