Produce Haus – the new name of the Zadik Zadikian Project Studio – is perched on the second floor of an historic building inside the massive 7th Street Produce Market in downtown Los Angeles. The building was constructed in 1918 – the same year that Warner Bros. Studios, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Otis College of Art and Design got started. A century later, Zadik Zadikian envisioned transf
orming the space into a vortex for creative collaboration. With large windows lining its 60-foot long east and west walls, the atmospheric expanse distills the light-filled openness and vastness that Zadikian feels are the essence of Los Angeles as a place. As artists intervene with large scale and monumental works throughout the architectural context of the building’s interior, the ever-changing environment itself becomes the work of art. Art critic and historian Peter Frank has written, “These works cannot be entered; they do not modify the interior architecture of the space. But they determine interventions into the space that are at once self-contained and responsive to the particularities of the environment…The artists treat the wall as a site not for composing a mural, but for composing an expanded physical and aesthetic experience. The space is raw; the outside light and atmosphere penetrate it; but the work maintains its self-possession precisely by responding to the vagaries of space, light, and material.”
