Stage 1, the annex space of Blue Lotus is pleased to present a one-person show by New York-based artist Charles LaBelle.

About the exhibition:
Titled “Lines of Flight,” the exhibition will present a group of new drawings from LaBelle’s ongoing series, Buildings Entered.  Begun over twelve years ago, Buildings Entered documents every building the artist has physically entered since 1997.  Currently, there are over ten thousand two hundred buildings in the archive.
 
Working from photographs, LaBelle’s drawings of specific buildings from the archive are delicately rendered in graphite on book pages in which most of the text has been painted out.  Thus, the drawings have a quality of a palimpsest, in which the original text and LaBelle’s annotations, are faintly visible behind the drawing itself.  Thus, the act of drawing and the act of writing are brought together in the work.  Significantly, LaBelle himself has stated that he views the overall project as both an artistic and a literary endeavor.
 
For “Lines of Flight,” LaBelle has made drawings of a dozen architecturally significant buildings that he has visited.  These include buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Thom Mayne, John Lautner, Philip Johnson, Antonio Gaudi and Norman Foster among others.
 
By foregrounding the act of “entering” these buildings, LaBelle’s project reveals a broader, conceptual framework: one that investigates the relationship between architecture and the body, between urban space and the construction of the subject.  At heart, Buildings Entered demarcates “lines of flight” in which the artist locates moments of escape and reverie in the midst of the “noise” of city life.
 
“Perusing these diary-like sketches of buildings, the passages of daily life are brought to an abrupt halt.  Casual experience, normally undertaken by rote, is turned into an act of keen awareness.”  -Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times