Lauren Bon
Artist
“Artists need to create on the same scale that society has the capacity to destroy.”
Biography
Lauren Bon is an environmental artist from Los Angeles. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. Some of her works include Not A Cornfield, which transformed and revived an industrial brownfield in downtown Los Angeles into a 32-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle, and 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 240-mile performative action that aimed to reconnect the city of Los Angeles with the source of its water for the centenary of the opening of the aqueduct. Her studio’s current work, Bending the River Back into the City, aims to utilize Los Angeles’ first private water right to deliver 106-acre feet of water annually from the L.A. River to over 50 acres of land in the historic core of downtown. This model can be replicated to regenerate the 52-mile L.A. River, reconnect it to its floodplain, and form a citizens’ utility.