In Quaternion, artists Kristen Wentrcek & Andrew Zebulon have created an installation that draws on the material, ornamental, and functional histories of the Marciano Art Foundation’s building, which was once the home of a Scottish Rite Masonic temple designed in 1961 by the artist and architectural designer Millard Sheets. Taking its title from the figure of a double-headed eagle, a central symbol in the visual culture of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, Quaternion is composed of sixteen individual works that can be arranged in various constellations. Wentrcek & Zebulon have created an ensemble of functional furniture that they have hand-carved out of industrial-grade foam before covering its individual elements in a skin-thick pigmented coating.

With three main bodies of seating, each in its own specific color, the works in Quaternion form a circuit-like composition that encourages contact between both its visitors and the books that line the room’s shelves. In Club Chair, a deep seated lounge chair cut with a serrated blade from a larger block of foam, we see the most direct quotation of the furniture found in the library’s original incarnation as a lounge for the members of the Masonic temple. While Club Chair offers the visitors individual stations for rest, Club Sofa and Daybed extend an invitation to larger groups. With formal references to the architecture of cruise ships, fortresses, and airports—three of the various motifs Wentrcek & Zebulon studied while conceptualizing the installation—the artists’ simple gesture of carving lounge seating out of industrial foam brings these more global references into conversation with the historical idiosyncrasies of the architecture of the Temple itself.

By accepting the artists’ invitation to relax, read and converse, visitors are encouraged to organize their bodies within the installation in a way that’s comfortable, allowing them to briefly exist in a convivial collaboration with the sculpted foam.

Quaternion is commissioned by Marciano Art Foundation with support provided by Marta, Los Angeles. All works courtesy the artists and Marta, Los Angeles.