Opening
Saturday, September 06
5 – 8PM

On View
September 06 – October 18 2025

Wednesday – Saturday
Noon – 5PM

Marta
3021 Rowena Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90039

“The fields were everywhere treated as a garden made for the pleasure as well as the livelihood of all...” — William Morris, News From Nowhere (1890)

Marta presents A Garden of… an exhibition of new and recent work by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of the New York-based architecture and design studio MOS. Anchored by the first instance of self-enclosed architecture to be hosted in the gallery, the presentation positions itself as a broad examination of the relationship between curation and collaboration, integration and aggregation—of the sites we can, and must!, create to strengthen and celebrate the individual and collective needs on which all societies are predicated.

Gardens, in both their physical and metaphorical embodiments, are spaces of abundance. They are grounds for cultivation—of flora, of ideas, of generative (and regenerative) ecosystems that derive their power from the perennial and the evergreen. As an entity, the greenhouse is a microcosm of this space. Within these structures, growth is nurtured, protected, and observed with a particularly keen eye. Their architecture is conceived to control the elements—light, temperature, moisture—that induce optimal states of being within their fixed habitats. These buildings are tasked not only with the basic intention of keeping their environments alive, but with creating the conditions in which they will, ideally, thrive—a thematic focus that saturates writer, designer, and social activist William Morris’ novel News from Nowhere (1890), the late twentieth-century text that Sample and Meredith have made specific reference to in the conception and execution of their exhibition.

Centered on the narrator’s awakening into a future society that has been structured around foundational socialist principles—common ownership, democratic control of the means of production—Morris’ soft science fiction work offers a utopian vision of a world where the pleasure of nature is enmeshed with the pleasure of work, posing a direct challenge to the dismissive refrain that the former disincentives the latter. Within the gallery’s main exhibition space, the architects proffer an environment that, like the one rendered in Morris’ text, eschews the notion of their mutual exclusion, presenting, in tandem, a series of unique and production works that point towards the duo’s larger interest in systematization—of inhabited space and the objects that reside within their construction.

Measuring approximately 180 square feet, Sample and Meredith’s Greenhouse No. 4, a new iteration in the lineage of the duo’s designs for community greenhouses, fits comfortably within the larger footprint of its installation—a building within a building. Upon entry through the open wings of its double doors, visitors are received into a sentient atmosphere of plant life activations facilitated by Darren Romanelli, a reminder that the greenhouse is a purpose-specific, engineered entity meant to operate as its designation suggests. It is a product of Sample and Meredith’s expertise and commitment to the literal and speculative capacities of the typology.

Fabricated in sections of aluminum with built-in seating and shelving along the two interior side walls, the structure exists as both an independent work as well as a nexus of display for those by other artists included in the exhibition—the so-called ‘friends of MOS’ whose practices the duo have invited to dialogue with their own. Amidst the interlocking arrangements that comprise Sample and Meredith’s aluminum basketry, wool rugs produced in partnership with Urban Fabric, and Twice Woven Prints—the first direct correspondence between Marta Editions and the gallery’s programming—are four photographs from New York-based artist Michael Vahrenwald that illuminate botanical moments in seemingly abandoned, or leftover, concrete landscapes. Nearby, the extended plane of Providence, Rhode Island-based artist Tony Cokes’ fluorescent orange aluminum bench spells out the shorthand of its intent: ‘toctrlattn’—to control attention. Within the greenhouse, a speaker plays a looped composition by Los Angeles-based writer and musician Maya Bushell and Jared Carrigan of the duo Coldspring, whose layers of field recordings, instrumentation, and vocal work blend into an aural translation of mind and environment and the everyday frequencies—song and storm, conversation and cicada—that emanate from their respective habitations. Together, these works transform the gallery into a fecund garden that grows and engages according not only to its own DNA, but to, and with, the ecosystem in which it is situated, each adapting and evolving according to its ability, and to its needs.

Here, the credo of Morris returns, whereby the designs of inhabited spaces, whether interior or exterior, encourage expressions of the Self in order to advance the good of society—indeed, for the sake of its survival. As designers and architects whose work has consistently engaged with the contours of different communities, considering needs related to housing, education, and healthcare, Meredith and Sample propose yet another alternative—a garden that is radical but no less winsome; precise but no less wild, and therefore eternal, in possibility.

MOS is a design and architecture studio led by Michael Meredith (b. 1971) and Hilary Sample (b. 1971). Working from a position of being horizontal and fuzzy, as opposed to being tall and shiny, their approach to design scales towards making smaller architecture. The are the recipients of The Architecture Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, Fellowships at the American Academy in Rome, US Artists Award, and Emerging Voices from The Architectural League in New York. Their work is held in the collections of MoMA, Yale University Art Gallery, The Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Museum of Art, Harvard Loeb Library Special Collections, and Columbia University Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. They have designed housing for artists, unconventional exhibitions, and art and design schools, as well as books, objects, and furniture. Their work has been exhibited at the MoMA, Guggenheim Bilbao, MAK Center in Los Angeles, Seoul Museum of Art, Venice Biennale, Milan Triennale, a83 Gallery, Chamber Projects, Maniera Brussels, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture.

A Garden of... is MOS’ first exhibition with Marta Los Angeles, and follows the architects’ recent participation in the inaugural release of Marta Editions, the gallery’s new venue for presenting and distributing limited-edition works on paper.