Michael C. McMillen: Back Lot (2017), West Hollywood, Urban Art Program

Michael C. McMillen: Back Lot (2017), West Hollywood, Urban Art Program. Los Angeles, October 18, 2024. Location: 1041 N. Formosa Ave., West Hollywood.

Description: The artist presents a re-imagined 11 x 50′ strip of pavement sandwich between the city side walk and historic walk, adjacent to the Howard Hughes garage as a portion of a once active “back lot”. A boulder strewn sandscape features a movie camera focused on the remains of an abandoned set that appears to be settling into the strata of history. Seen from the street, the monumental movie camera perched atop a 12′ tripod beckons as as an iconic symbol of film making technology. The viewer who ventures off the sidewalk to explore will experience the delightful disorientation of scale shifts and discovery. Visitors feel small as they walk through the legs of the tripod beneath the towering camera and giant as they examine the richly textured surfaces of a miniaturized set, the background for imagined drama. A third element, an oversize Klieg light mounted on the garage completes the triad; Lights, Camera and Action and draws attention to two mysterious viewing ports in the long sealed garage door.

The curious, who venture to look through a viewer will be rewarded with clues as to who might have occupied this forgotten space. A writing desk topped with a vintage typewriter, telephone and heaped with scripts suggests a persona we never see. Surrounding this tableau is an array of salvaged scientific equipment. The enigmatic occupant appears to have been a storyteller, inventor and dreamer who had envisioned and conjured the prototype for the astonishing Opto-Tronic Visualizer, a device that was designed to screen his story in perpetuum.

The project acknowledges the City of West Hollywood as the site of one of the early film studios in operation and its continuous service to the industry to the present. It is a celebration of the mythos of movie making and a tribute to the creative genius “behind the scenes” and in garages everywhere.

(source: Public Art Archive)

Michael C. McMillen: Back Lot, 2017. West Hollywood, CA, USA. Urban Art Program.

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