Mona Kuhn. Kings Road.

In Kings Road Mona Kuhn lyrically reconsiders the realms of time and space within the architectural elements of the Schindler House in Los Angeles. Built by Austrian architect Rudolph M. Schindler in 1922, the house was both a social and design experiment and an avant-garde hub for intellectuals and artists in the 1920s and ’30s. For this project Kuhn collaborated with the Architecture and Design Collection at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and gained access to Schindler’s private archives including blueprints, letters and notes. Alongside reproducing some of these for the first time in this book, Kuhn reinterprets the dichotomy between memory and record in a series of color photos, and solarized gelatin silver prints, a technique favored by the Surrealists. The enigmatic subject of her solarized pictures is a fictional, ethereal figure inspired by a letter from Schindler to a mysterious woman. Kuhn’s impressionistic photos render this female presence physical, even as it seems to be dematerializing: fleeting images that question the very nature of photography as record. I’m most comfortable representing the nude as minimal, timeless, almost monastic. But this time, I wanted to tran­ scend the physical limitations of our presence, of our body, and cross the elements of time and space. Mona Kuhn