THE SCORE ROOM

THE SCORE ROOM Installation

Geographies of the Invisible Line: Summer 2018 Artist Residencies at BBAX, Santa Monica, Los Angeles

„For Doris Schamp, an Austrian artist, becoming a witness to the depth and ubiquity of L.A.‘s widespread homeless crisis made a deep impression on her psyche and her eye.
Her room-size accumulation of symbols and emoji-like drawings and objects, called “The Score Room” offers a relatively sterile space, both friendly and ironic, in which each reduc- tive gesture references an individual encounter, like a walk-in a shorthand diary.

Pure white and peppered with black glyphs in crisp, stark contrast, it contains certain bar- riers, but also great potential. You reached it by way of Abait‘s giant map-room, as though it were a chapel at the end of a pilgrimage. Schamp‘s experiences in the community also inspired a singular sculpture, a shopping cart hanging in midair and casting its delicate geometric shadows like a post-urban mobile. Removed from any version of its functionality, one is forced to consider this ubiquitous design object in a new way, both formal and sociological. It was shown in proximity to
a mammoth installation by Davis Birks, who also includes a shopping cart in his perfor- mance-based sculptural environment wherein he puts his to practical as well as aesthetic purpose.“

Shana Nys Dambrot
in Building Bridges Art Exchange Curates A Residency of the Dispossessed, exhibition catalogue, 2018.