There is a hole in the ground near the bank of the Los Angeles River in Chinatown that the artist Lauren Bon has spent the past decade trying to dig. It isn’t the hole so much as what it might contain that has prolonged the process, which has required more than 100 permits from over twenty government agencies. I follow her up makeshift wooden stairs to peer over the rim of a concrete tube barely larger than a man, or as she’d have it, a (wo)manhole. Fifty feet down—beneath the tow yard, the railroad tracks, the concrete straitjacket the Army Corps of Engineers poured over the waterway in 1938—lambent, cerulean sky shimmers back at us. For a moment, what is above and below coincide.

Bon uses a mallet to strike a series of gongs affixed to the inside of the well, and as the sound reverberates, our faces ripple on the surface of the river. Bon calls this the Motherwell. It is the terminus of 300 feet of vitrified clay pipe, threaded over three consecutive construction seasons from the river’s low-flow channel to Metabolic Studio, her creative compound across the tracks in a former Standard Oil warehouse.

This humble aperture is part of Bending the River (2012-present), her long-running effort to reintroduce the river to the floodplain it once sustained. “What you’re looking at is a reunion,” she tells me, still poised over the opening. “The water is re-remembering the land; the land re-remembering the water.” 

Eventually, the water drawn from the river will be lifted, filtered, and redirected to irrigate the nearby Los Angeles State Historic Park—a thirty-two-acre expanse that, not long ago, was a brownfield—and, in time, elsewhere in the arid city. Performing acts of reparation is the animating premise of Metabolic Studio, reflected in the bywords ever-illuminated in vermillion neon along the building’s wall: “Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy.”

Amid the studio’s sprawling native plant gardens stand three towering, oxidized drill bits that broke during the removal of 300 feet of foot-and-a-half-thick concrete where the pipe was laid. The spiral augers convey the scale of the intervention required to produce the fifty-foot water shaft and the small industrial grate at the bottom of the river. Inside, a stack of printed permits rising nearly a foot high is enshrined in plexiglass, materializing the Dadaesque bureaucracy that Bon and her team navigated before construction could begin. Visualizing the invisible systems that structure our lives is a driving force behind much of her practice...

continued on page 18 of Issue 06, only in print