Lauren Bon (born 1962) is an artist who works with architecture, performance, photography, sound, and farming, to create urban, public, and land art projects that she terms "devices of wonder"[1] to galvanize social and political transformation.
Her 2017 project, Bending the River Back into the City, utilizes Los Angeles’s first water commons and allows the currency of water to create social capital[5] The Optics and Sonic Divisions of Metabolic Studio have exhibited and performed widely, including at MASS MoCA, MA (2016),[6] George Eastman House, NY (2013),[7][8] Nevada Art Museum, NV (2014),[9] Hammer Museum, CA (2015),[10] and BBC Radio 3, UK (2014).
Lauren Bon’s Metabolic Studio is a force for change, showing that another reality is possible and pointing the way new endeavors and practices in an age of economic and environmental scarcity.
“ARTISTS NEED TO CREATE AT THE SAME SCALE THAT SOCIETY HAS THE CAPACITY TO DESTROY” proclaims a red neon sign on one wall of the Metabolic Studio in a warehouse on the edge of Chinatown in downtown Los Angeles.
This phased project will begin to manifest in 2018 with the creation of an inflatable dam that will sit in the LA River—bending and driving a percentage of the river water through a diversion canal, and into a treatment facility.
"[19] AgH20 a 240-mile work that aims at reconnecting Los Angeles with the elements that made it viable historically: silver and water, both mined from the mountains of the Owens Valley.
[25] Bon’s project Garden Folly displayed a fusion of weakened strawberry plants and medical equipment such as intravenous lines, bags, and solution.
Farmlab’s signature projects involved properties in downtown Los Angeles on often mismanaged by political agencies or poorly effected by real estate market forces.
The conversations examined land use, politics, activism, environmental crisis, food equity, biological remediation of social and physical brownfields, or places not capable of supporting life.