..This month Schweder - calling himself the Schweder Office of Architectural Performances, or SOAP - brought a new performance piece, "Architectural Advice for Performative Renovations," to Edward Cella Art & Architecture, the gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. It's part of a new annual show there called "Vernacular Environments," which in this edition includes work by Robert Smithson, Stephen Berens, Jennifer Bolande and Raúl Cordero, among others.

The rituals of domesticity have long been a focus for cutting-edge practices in both art and architecture. Examples abound: Architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio slyly subverted the politics of gender and labor underpinning household chores in their Bad Pres: Housework Series, 1993-98, which included a set of men's dress shirts pressed into bizarre shapes according to "Instructions for a Dissident Ironing"; artists Arakawa and Madeline Gins literally recalibrated the topography of the domestic landscape in their 2008 Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa), which sought nothing less than to challenge humankind's acceptance of its own mortality. Over the past ten years, the artists Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley have made a significant contribution to this ongoing and  cross-disciplinary inquiry, teaming up to test the relationships between architecture and domestic inhabitation in four performance projects, the most recent of which is ReActor, 2016, a boxcar-like-structure balanced on a single column and set on a hilltop at the Omi International Arts Center in Ghent, New York. 

"For Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley, the term “artist in residence” is often a very literal one: Collaborators since 2007, the pair practice what Schweder describes as “performance architecture,” or the exploration of how inhabiting a space affects us, psychologically. So they build interesting structures, and then move in."