In &Milk, recent Guggenheim Fellow, Ben Thorp Brown presents new work in sculpture, photography, and his 2019 video, Cura, filmed in the Neutra VDL House II on the Silver Lake Reservoir. Produced with support from the Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; and Museo Amparo, Puebla; and Creative Capital, the work has an extensive exhibition history, but this will be the Los Angeles debut and Brown’s first exhibition in Los Angeles. Alongside the film, Brown has produced a series of recent sculptures and photographs in response to Cura’s Garden, an immersive, living installation that Brown opened at KunsthalGent in Belgium in May 2023. Like the film, the installation and resulting works draw on themes of care and creation, empathy, and design for emotional effect.
In Cura, Brown brings to life principles developed by the Austrian American architect Richard Neutra, who saw architecture as a therapeutic tool and designed projects in which each environmental element was carefully calculated to elicit sensory and emotional responses. Intrigued by Neutra’s aspirations to create architecture that was designed with empathy for the inhabitants, and the way that ideal contrasts with some of the homogenizing, developmentalist, and “rational” impulses of the modernist project, Brown focuses his camera’s eye on a regal and ancient-seeming tortoise, who moves slowly and purposefully through this iconic space, singing in the voice of Cura. (Performed by Joan La Barbara, and Ethan Philbrick on the cello.)
In Roman mythology, Cura created a human by shaping a lump of clay and asking Jove to supply this earthly body with a spirit. When they quarreled over whose name this new being should carry, Cura or Jove, Saturn intervened and named it Homo (after Humo, the earth that formed the body.) Cura was charged with the responsibility of caring for humans while they lived on earth, and Jove with responsibility for their spirits after death.
