French artist Vincent Lamouroux has recently taken over Silver Lake’s Sunset Pacific Motel. Prohibitively known by locals as the “Bates Motel,” the condemned structure at Sunset and Bates has been transformed by Lamouroux into a temporal art intervention that will last until May 10th. Over the past two weeks visible signs of the change have manifest daily, and this infamous vestige of Silver Lake’s grittier pre-gentrified past has become something beautiful and imposing.

The artist has covered the decrepit Motel entirely, including its surrounding palm trees and flanking billboard, with layers of white lime paint, arresting the site in a state of indefinite transformation. Simultaneously an erasure and a re-assertion, the existing architecture is transfigured into something excessively surreal, like a life-sized architectural model or an enormous maquette. Now clad in white and divested of its sordid past, the Sunset Pacific Motel is an unlikely apparition, inviting a moment of visual quietude into an otherwise undifferentiated urban expanse. Projection becomes a visually poignant interruption of our daily experience, punctuating the monotony of the day to day with a sensitized encounter. The familiar building becomes pure potential in the absence of its degraded reality, as the accretions of the motel’s past are stripped away and a promise of new life restored with blank walls.

Vincent Lamouroux, Projection, 2015. Photo by Guillaume Onimus. Courtesy of Please Do Not Enter and Vincent Lamouroux.

In an interview, according to Lamouroux, Projection is very much about this promise of reanimation. The emptiness and indeterminate future of the “Bates Motel” immediately appealed to Lamouroux, whose established practice is very much about engaging site specificity and staging experiential encounters. The structure has been unoccupied and shuttered for many years, and in Lamouroux’s words “has lost its capacity to affect.” This loss of purpose is tantamount to a loss of life in any structure, and with Projection, Lamouroux has created new conditions for the building’s reception, encouraging the viewer to “project” their desires onto the unscripted white space. The artist restores a singularity and emotional valence to the site by setting it apart in the landscape, and gives it the chance to reclaim a new identity through the reactions it will elicit.

Vincent Lamouroux, Projection, 2015. Photo by Guillaume Onimus. Courtesy of Please Do Not Enter and Vincent Lamouroux.

Projection embodies Lamouroux’s penchant for the creation of seemingly impossible circumstances. His work seeks to alter the viewer’s experience of reality and place through the disruption of sensory expectations. He has created shape-shifting floors in museums, sculptures out of air, architecturally scaled geometries, and has even filled a 13th-century abbey with an entropic world of sand. Lamouroux’s ability to harness what he calls “the potentiality of the dream” and to make it a material reality is truly phenomenal.

Though formally sophisticated and measured, Lamouroux’s work is ultimately invested in human narrative and metaphor, rather than conceptual self-referentiality. He is an artist who creates new conditions of experience and challenges his viewer to discover new spaces within the known. Fittingly, Lamouroux describes Projection as a moment of quiet in a city of change: “Projection tells you to slow down. It disrupts the landscape with a pure, quiet, blanched moment. We’re constantly concerned with speed, this is an invitation to slow down and to reflect.” Projection was produced by LA’s Please Do Not Enter, and opens to the public this Sunday, April 26th, from 3 – 6 p.m.

Projection is located at 4301 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90029 www.projectionla.com /www.pleasedonotenter.com / www.vincentlamouroux.net