Marta is pleased to host L.A. Door’s work at the gallery’s original location:

Marta Echo Park
1545 W. Sunset Boulevard
Los Angeles, California
90026 – 3333

Wednesday – Saturday
Noon – 5PM

Marta is delighted to host a presentation of new and existing works by Katie Payne and Doug McCollough of Los Angeles-based furniture practice L.A. Door, on view at the gallery’s Echo Park space from February 04 to March 04, 2023. Knowingly engaging with decorative arts histories spanning Federal, Shaker, Neo-Classical, Studio Craft, and Postmodern movements, Payne and McCollough delight in examining vernacular Americana through a contemporary lens.

For the pair’s inaugural hosted solo presentation, celebrations of traditional and in some cases near-obsolete typologies present a joyous resistance to the generalized furniture of the now: Anchoring the exhibition, a blanket chest in quilted maple wood (2020)—its drawers adorned with lacrimal pulls made with the Bay Area artist Garry Knox Bennett (1934–2022)—tenaciously presents and suggests a hyper-specific use. On the facing wall, a mirror realized in knotty pine (2023) engages with the mythos of trompe-l’œil: superfluous, counterfeit knots are rendered, faux-bois, in concert with the painter Daniel Payavis, creating something of a game for the viewer/beholder.

Elsewhere, direct and indirect collaboration illustrates the open structure of L.A. Door’s studio practice, with protective-decorative plastic slipcovers adorning upholstered iterations of Bennett’s ‘Great Granny Rietveld’ chairs (2003/2022), and vintage quilts from East Meets West’s Lewis Keister draped upon Shaker-referencing blanket racks in solid cherry wood (2022).

Presiding over it all: an actual door, four-panel, in wood and inlaid linoleum, made by L.A. Door's Payne and McCollough as the simultaneous namesake and result of the studio’s tandem inception.

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L.A. Door is the Los Angeles furniture practice of Katie Payne (b. 1982, Detroit) and Doug McCollough (b. 1982, Tokyo). The duo’s background in design histories provides the foundation for a studio practice that updates and recontextualizes instances of American decorative arts. In 2021, the pair showed work with Marta as part of the gallery’s inaugural satellite exhibition, Built In at the Neutra VDL House.

Download the Press Release.