CLUI Exhibit Unit Visits MOCA

A CLUI MOBILE EXHIBIT UNIT has been deployed to the Museum of Contemporary Art Geffen Contemporary, near downtown Los Angeles. The Unit contains a display about the Desert Research Station, recently opened by the CLUI in Hinkley, California. The DRS and the current exhibit in the Unit were made possible by the exhibition Flight Patterns, curated by Connie Butler, and is on view at the Geffen Contemporary from November 12, 2000 to February 11, 2001. There is no admission charge to enter the CLUI Exhibit Unit, as it rests under the awning outside the main doors of the museum.

At the opening celebration for the Flight Patterns exhibit, which shares the cavernous Geffen Contemporary building with a new retrospective of the artist Paul McCarthy, revelers danced around the CLUI Mobile Exhibit Unit, bathed in colored lighting. All the while, as a stoic counterpoint, a MoCA guard kept a watchful eye over the Unit.

The 24-foot long portable building now at MoCA was modified to resemble the Desert Research Station, which is itself a manufactured structure (a "4-wide modular" with additions). The building is part of a fleet of CLUI exhibit and program support units, and was once used by the City of Los Angeles to support the construction of a 30-foot diameter sewer tunnel under the City.

After the closing of the Flight Patterns exhibit in February, this unit will fly up to the CLUI logistics yard in Boron, California, awaiting its next deployment. It will probably end up at the DRS as a satellite exhibit facility, depending on development plans there and ongoing negotiations with the Bureau of Land Management, which controls the land around the DRS. Though the CLUI owns the DRS building in Hinkley, the land it sits on is owned by the BLM. The CLUI continues to search for support to buy the land from the Government, which is requiring a cash payment of $10,000 for the parcel.