In conjunction with Florencia Pita's current installation at LA><ART.

LA><ART is pleased to present the launch of its A + D project series with a site-specific installation by Argentinean Los Angeles based emerging designer and architect Florencia Pita.  Alice inaugurates the initiative’s commitment to developing innovative projects in the fields of both architecture and design.

As an emerging woman architect in Los Angeles, Pita’s project for LA><ART addresses the provocations and intersections of digital technology, material experimentation, femininity, and ornament.  For Alice, Pita has produced an inverted and fictional landscape that transforms the space of the gallery into a fantastical environment in which figured forms are subject to experiments of conversion via color and surface.  This intervention addresses aesthetic experience, decoration, nostalgia, and memory, while relying on advanced digital experimentation.  Working with found images taken from two publications of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Pita will produce a series of panels incorporating translations of figural forms.  Rather than refer to the pictorial representations in both the 1865 and 1907 publications, Pita employs synthetic materials, manufactured color, and intricate pattern to evoke the space and mood of Carroll’s original text and its accompanying images, while subverting the masculinist discourse of digital architecture.

Currently faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-arc), Florencia Pita received her master’s degree in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in 2001.  Having practiced as a licensed architect since 1998, Pita has received numerous awards and ovations in her field.  Her work has been exhibited in venues such as the Schindler House in West Hollywood, MAK Gallery in Vienna, Austria, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s Pacific Design Center, and was featured in the 2004 Venice Biennale’s 9th International Architecture Exhibition, “Metamorph.”  Later this year she will be included in the exhibition “Louis Sullivan and Current Digital Ornament Design” at the Chicago Art Institute, as well as present her second solo exhibition at Spazio Expositivo di Santa Verdiana in Florence, Italy.