concept & vision

background and history of the project: The GALA Committee’s site specific intervention with Melrose Place is an elaborate and well-orchestrated collaboration in contemporary art and television. In 1995, invited to participate in a group show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA), artist Mel Chin gathered a team of artists, students and faculty to form the GALA Committee. They arranged with Melrose Place producers to create artworks as props for the popular primetime soap opera. Over several seasons, the artists produced a range of conceptual artworks and objects that updated art historical movements like Dada, Surrealism, and Agitprop, commented on social and political real-ties, deepened the content of unfolding plotlines, and elevated the form and content of a ‘90s pop-culture mainstay. The artworks were finally exhibited in the Uncommon Sense exhibition at MOCA, and then auctioned at Sotheby’s, Los Angeles, with all money donated to two women’s education charities in California and Georgia that supported women aged 18-49, the same target audience as Melrose Place

design & architecture

TOTAL PROOF is part exhibit, part film set, part archive. A series of reoccurring sets from Melrose Place organize the exhibit space and sequence. Their front sides are ‘silenced’ - we apply monochromatic tones to all surfaces, furniture and objects, to highlight the GALA Committee’s artwork. We leave their back sides raw, with a straightforward studs and plywood construction, to display the variety of archival documents—communiqués, sketches, and other ephemera--exchanged between the GALA Committee and the TV team

impact & significance

our intent is to visualize the invisible and complex plot, its artifacts and conversations. In the same spirit, a sunken Melrose Place pool, designed by Mel Chin, is transformed into a soft, upholstered conversation pit as the prime space to discuss the ramifications of “the generational transfer of ideas” developed by the work of the GALA Committee