At the core of the exhibition is Andersen’s ongoing engagement with collage as both method and metaphor. Using materials gathered across geographies - Chicha party posters from the Peruvian desert, tortilla paper from Mexico, dressmaking pins, and images from Victorian scrapbooks - her artworks compress multiple temporalities and cultural registers into richly textured compositions. Perforated edges of stamps might suggest communication and migration, while paper flowers recall feminine labor and craft. This medium also reflects Andersen’s peripatetic life, keeping studios in both Lima and Mexico City as well as spending time in multiple other locales. These experiences appear in the material of her collaged artworks that collect diverse popular cultures into a kaleidoscope of style and narrative. As these elements collide and jive they create a sum that encompasses the heterogeneity of the contemporary world, where countless hands and voices jockey for position. 

Collage is an inherently violent act where cutting, pinning, and tearing are procedures that contradict the material slightness and fragility of paper. Andersen foregrounds this contradiction by reflecting on the authority embedded in the act of assembly and dissemination and how through making collage she can collapse the space between author and audience and create an entirely new message. Even when the ink is dry, Andersen finds authorship in methodology; presenting a process that collects, fuses, and recirculates. 

Alongside the collages, Andersen has made a new body of wooden puzzles that extend her exploration of authority and social dynamics, encompassing these relationships from the familial to the geopolitical in scale. Games and how we play them are not just pastimes and entertainment, but may often hold real-world consequences. Building on earlier puzzle-based works, these sculptural forms incorporate stackable and pierced elements where ideas of order and chance intersect with broader questions of movement and control, creating a tension between change and permanence that runs throughout the exhibition.

Music and rhythm also play a subtle yet persistent role across the exhibition. Many of Andersen’s previous artworks have incorporated musical elements, however Parlour Games excludes a discrete sonic component. Instead Andersen asserts her collages and puzzles as instruments themselves that engage the “noise” of our everyday experiences. Rather than avoiding the noise of our media inundation, Andersen embraces it as a foundational element from which rhythm and melody can be drawn out and constructed.

In many ways, Parlour Games marks a shift in Andersen’s approach. Where her earlier work may have been wary of distraction, this exhibition acknowledges clamor and cacophony as an inalienable element of our reality and encourages one to dive in: if not for the sake of creative inspiration, but perhaps as a method of survival. In order to reckon with an increasingly complex world, Andersen finds that it is necessary to immerse ourselves, holding our pleasures alongside our discomforts to confront narratives we might otherwise choose to ignore.

Lotte Andersen (b. 1989 in London, UK) is a British artist working in the Americas. She currently has studios in Lima and Mexico City. While living in London, Andersen founded MAXILLA, a series of parties and happenings that was active between 2010-2015, where she organized a scene of artists, photographers, designers, gallerists and critics. 

Andersen has exhibited with Helena Anrather and Francis Irv, New York; Nina Johnson, Miami; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles; and Rose Easton, London, amongst others.  She has shown with institutions such as the Studio Museum, Harlem; Tate Modern, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and the Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City.

In 1950, the Museum of Modern Art would ask Ain to construct a suburban home in the museum courtyard for a presentation titled ‘Exhibition House’. Fully staged with affordable, modern furniture and decorated with artworks from the museum’s permanent collection, Ain’s full-scale ‘Exhibition House’ sought to establish an example of how art and the way we live are inextricably linked. Underwritten by business titans like the Rockefellers and curated by architectural superstar Philip Johnson, Ain’s ‘Exhibition House’ proposed a utopian hyperbole of middle-class consumer access to modern living in America’s atomic age.

Today’s iteration of Exhibition House reconsiders Ain’s career as a case study in how the mechanisms of surveillance, finance, real estate, and preservation shape the afterlife of socially engaged architecture. Located across two sites — Frankfurt Ordorica and Meier St., an arts space operating out of a Mar Vista Tract home — the works by Carlos Agredano, Jono Coles, and Harrison Kinnane Smith revive and reproduce Ain’s commitment to a political social art and illuminate how debates surrounding housing and development in the 1950s remain unresolved today.

Carlos Agredano (b. 1998 in Los Angeles, CA) lives and works between Los Angeles and New York City. He received his MFA from UCLA in 2023 and is currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a grant for artists to pursue independent projects. Agredano focuses on social inequality and urban planning, with particular emphasis on pollution as a force of perpetuating existing disparities. His work has been exhibited at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles Nomadic Division, Human Resources LA, Francois Ghebaly, and Sculpture Center, NY.

Jono Coles (b. 1997 in Pittsburgh, PA) lives and works between Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA. He received his M.Arch from UC Berkeley in 2024. Coles works between traditional architectural practice, art practice, teaching, and writing to critique the American architecture profession. His works have been published by the Guggenheim Foundation, AIA CA, and several architecture journals. Coles is the recipient of the Eisner Prize, the highest recognition of creativity given by UC Berkeley, and has received awards for housing design from organizations including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), The City of Los Angeles’ Housing Department, CityLAB-UCLA, and the California Homebuilding Foundation.

Harrison Kinnane Smith (b. 1997 in Pittsburgh, PA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received his MFA from UCLA in 2025. Kinnane Smith’s work is collaborative and site-specific, often working through municipal bureaucracies, financial systems, and public institutions to critique systems of inequity and repression. His work has been exhibited at Emmelines, NY, Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Sculpture Center, NY, and Mattress Factory, PA. Kinnane Smith is the Co- Director of the Morning Star Research Center for the Afterlife of Slavery.