The latest brick and mortar home of A+D Museum in Los Angeles is currently the host of curator Laure Michelon’s exhibition “We Are Here: Imagining Space in the 21st Century.” Retail is more the name of the game in this stretch of La Brea storefronts, so I wouldn’t imagine the headline would grab the attention of too many casual passersby. Nonetheless, it is a fitting title (if not content) to re-introduce the museum to the city. 

The transmediatic display of models, drawings, photographs, animations and projections attest to our shared interest in bird’s eye thinking. What is it about this way of representing the world that we find so tantalizing? Aerials have an omnipresence that can nimbly move between real and imagined territories, and these contributors (architects, but also artists and designers) all play adventurous cartographers of a sort. What they map is real and speculative but more often some hybrid of both. Meandering through the interconnected spaces, I am reminded of Charles and Ray Eames’ seminal film Powers of Ten; some of these journeys, too, can only be measured in magnitudes. 

But there is plenty of breathing room by way of white walls. We are asked to look straight ahead, and periodically towards the ground. Works of art in our age of unprecedented climate anxiety race against time, and these examples are no exception. The ambitions of the show exceed the scale and scope of what’s on view here—a fact acknowledged in the opening text. Indeed, one could imagine that the data mined for this exhibition would constitute only the first of many iterations on this immense topic. But it’s a potent starting point. Xs mark spots.

jb.