For Frieze Los Angeles 2024, Art Production Fund will be presenting the on-site public program ‘Set Seen’, featuring works that speak to constructed environments and how they relate to our perception of reality and understanding of space. These projects are in dialogue with the rich history of set design in Los Angeles and specifically the role that set designers played in camouflaging the former Douglas Aircraft Company factory at Santa Monica Airport. This program is free to the public.

Cynthia Talmadge's Class Gift will be on view at Airport Park from February 28 – April 7, 2024.

3201 Airport Ave, Santa Monica, CA

Class Gift adopts the style of large public sculpture typically found in civic settings, including college campuses. Here, the looming biomorphic abstraction has been treated like a bulletin board rather than an object of aesthetic contemplation by students. As a “gift” from the previous class, the sculpture is adorned with detritus from collegiate activity: sticky notes, flyers, lost notices, and a streaming roll of toilet paper, most likely courtesy of unseen fraternity members in a moment of post-exam revelry. Equally banal and melodramatic, these additions hint at the unfulfilled promises of both the academic institutions themselves and our aspirational views of them.

Class Gift was originally displayed as a part of Talmadge’s solo exhibition Winter Break, Carl Kostyál Gallery, London, 2022.