Mona Kuhn: Kings Road

In King's Road Mona Kuhn turns her camera on the life and personal home of architect Rudolph M. Schindler, whose cooperative dwelling at 835 Kings Road in West Hollywood was conceived as a design and social experiment and quickly became an avant-garde meeting place for artists and intellectuals like Marlene Dietrich, Albert Einstein, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Incorporating a variety of media - chromogenic dye coupler prints presenting the muted palate and delicate materials comprising Schindler's spare design, careful reproductions of primary sources from the architect's archive, and solarized silver prints of a timeless and spectral nude figure, Kuhn crafts a narrative that extends well beyond the historical record.

In depicting Schindler’s symbolic thwarted love, Kuhn utilizes the solarized silver gelatin process, creating a sense of permeability between time and space and enabling Kuhn to ally her practice with historically notable ghosts who employed the technique, from André Breton and Erwin Blumenfeld to Lee Miller and Man Ray.