Honor Fraser proudly presents Concrete is fluid, a solo exhibition by the eco-hacktivist Lauren Bon. The exhibition features room-scale installations of ancient soils and subterranean seedbanks reconfigured into magical assemblages for ecological thinking. Bon’s post-industrial earthworks, photographs, and sculptures index two decades of collaborative interventions and champion the Earth’s immutable cycles of upheaval, abundance, and reparation. Please join us for the opening reception on Saturday, September 14 from 2–5 PM.

Concrete is fluid is a featured exhibition of PST ART: Art & Science Collide.

Evoking the paramount medium of industrial Los Angeles, Concrete is fluid chronicles Bon’s creative techniques to shape, disrupt, and ultimately restore the landscape that she inhabits. Concrete serves as a conceptual anchor throughout the exhibition. While seemingly fixed and sedimentary, concrete never fully dries. Bon draws out this paradox to underscore the flexibility we must embody to meet the mounting ecological challenges at hand. Retooling the poetic utility of concrete, Bon transports us to a subterranean womb where layers of earth gestate into living metaphors of care, resilience, and mutability. In turn, visitors will find Honor Fraser transformed into an alchemical sounding board for Bon’s ecological compositions—lyrical artworks that bubble up with the sounds and aromas of life, death, and recomposition.

Central to Bon’s genre-bending art practice is her community platform, Metabolic Studio. Founded in 2005, Metabolic Studio is a nexus for artists, scientists, and activists to workshop experimental solutions to today’s most pressing environmental issues. Working with Metabolic Studio, Bon leads wide-ranging environmental projects. These interventions span from the cyborg watershed of the LA Basin to the Intermountain West, covering areas from the Sierra Nevada to the Rocky Mountains.

At the heart of Concrete is fluid is Bon’s and Metabolic Studio’s ongoing civic enterprise Bending the river, an ambitious plan to redirect and reuse water flowing beneath the concrete channel known as the LA River. Now entering its tenth year of development, Metabolic Studio has acquired over one hundred federal, state, and local permits to hack the LA River’s infrastructure. Additionally, Bon has acquired the first private water right, which allows her to legally lift, clean, and transport one hundred and six acre-feet of water to the LA State Historic Park. Bending the river is set to conclude construction later this year. Once in operation, the intervention will form a new citizens’ utility that pioneers a broader paradigm shift toward sustainable and adaptable life-supporting systems.

Concrete is Fluid features photographic documentation and construction site ephemera from Bending the river, alongside performance relics and unique observational instruments made at Metabolic Studio. Bon’s exhibition, however, transcends a mere display of facts, tools, and logistics. Instead, Honor Fraser serves as a conduit between Metabolic Studio and Bon’s singular artistic vision. Bon opts for the poetics of earth, light, sound, and time. She presents artworks that reflect the spiritual and scientific rituals that she uses to evoke the planet’s sublime forces of change. Replicating these tactics at the gallery, Bon repurposes salvaged materials from construction sites and local ecological disturbances to create immersive installations. The resulting artworks form a somatic landscape that is at once playground, laboratory, and classroom.

At its core, Concrete is fluid honors the planet’s more-than-human forces as ancient mediators of knowledge, history, and culture. Bon’s artworks accentuate the biological abundance of landslides, the maternal qualities of river wells, the photographic chemistry of watersheds, and the sonic tapestry of our industrial landscape. In the gallery’s largest exhibition space, sixty-nine “birthing figures”, made from unearthed river stones and Owens Lake crystals, pepper an undulating topography of LA Underland, pressed-earth pedestals, Salton Sea chandeliers, and cascading columns of germinating avalanche. Bon’s spiritually charged floorworks extend into the adjoining galleries, where large-scale performance artifacts echo the sacred geometry embedded throughout Bon’s photographs, collages, and site-specific rubbings.

Concrete is Fluid will also steward Metabolic Studio’s third Un-development intervention, continuing a series that began in 2015. Metabolic’s Un-developments reclaim urban space by peeling back layers of concrete and allowing nature to reassert itself. For Un-development 3, Bon and the FarmLab team at Metabolic Studio will transform Honor Fraser’s asphalt car park into a porous floodplain for the nearby Ballona Creek. This process will involve unsealing the tarmac, dismantling the concrete, and implementing soil remediation procedures. Through a series of workshops and teach-ins, the FarmLab team will complete Un-development 3 in stages throughout the run of Concrete is fluid, demonstrating how ecological reparations can be practiced on scales as small as a parking spot.

Bon’s installations, interventions, and public programming coalesce into a powerful call to action. They remind us to protect the planet’s finite resources while embracing the landscape’s generative cycles of change and restoration. Bon playfully answers her own call with a wide range of artworks that forward a tender alternative to nihilism in the face of mounting ecological precarity.