Giovanni’s Room is pleased to present The Iris, a site-specific installation of drawings and photographs by artist Patrick Winfield Vogel, with an original text by Norman M. Klein. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Norman:

The intersection at Cahuenga and Romaine first bustled in 1918. Two stages in LA's memory are buried here-- both the hidden process inside films, and
stages in the rapid growth of the entire Hollywood area, from an old Tongva trail to Cahuenga Pass to present-day Hollywood.

The Cahuenga Pass was the Iris for early settlers, and the early sound studios. Settlers "passed' through on the way to real estate, or moviemaking enroute to the finished product. In that sense, the Pass may be the most "unfinished" road in southern California history. From this window, across the street, Metro Pictures Studios could be seen, until they were moved to Culver City as MGM. Chaplin made his finest shorts one block north, in a clumsy studio that was later owned by Buster Keaton, where he produced most of his silent films. When Metro left by 1923, the Technicolor Corporation took over the site, developed two strip, then three strip color. On the east side of the Pass, the Warner Brothers set up their first studio.

Two stages in LA's memory are buried here-- both the hidden process inside films, and stages in the rapid growth of the entire Hollywood area. They each relied on the old Tongva trail, en route to Cahuenga Valley, into what became Hollywood. Before the arrival of automobiles, travelers suffered two days in order to cross the Pass. It was finally transformed into the Ventura Freeway. It was finally multiplied into a freeway and a boulevard, visible here from the gallery windows. A road in memory of its former existence snakes alongside, as excess to the Hollywood Bowl.

With the film industry all but having left Hollywood, this iris fades in and out, as a mental picture into layers of forgotten buildings, each a stage that is replaced. The Pass served as practically the only way to get to the early backlots of Universal Studios and Studio City; as well as the Hollywood Bowl. It speaks to a modesty, even a clumsiness, and honesty.

Patrick:

The iris shot was developed as a camera transition device during the silent era, and many of those films were made on this block. This exhibition continues a contemplation at this crossroads of film, light and the apparatus effect, framing the intersection as a silent movie which bustles in, out and through the iris of the gallery. There is a focusing and blurring effect of inner and outer space, a pulling of focus; a single celestial photograph from Canoga Park invokes the cosmologic gaze, with the viewer as ontological witness. Background, architecture and the ground all meld into a dream state of the present.

The Iris opens Friday, July 24th, from 4-8pm at 950 N. Cahuenga Boulevard. The exhibition will be on view through September 5.

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Patrick Winfield Vogel was born in West Hollywood in 1991. Growing up in the film industry provided early exposure to many disciplines and modes of working. Vogel’s installations, drawings and sculptures have been exhibited in Los Angeles at the New Wolford House, Phase Gallery, Helen J Gallery, Office Space Burbank, CalArts, and the Torrance Art Museum. They received an MFA in Art + Technology from California Institute of the Arts. In late August 2026 they will begin a yearlong Fulbright project in Bangalore, India conducting independent research on Dravidian architecture and public space.