Illumination Shines on “Reindeer Road”

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Oh what fun it is to ride in a one horse (okay, 6 cylinder) open (well, it was chilly, so the windows were open to take photos only) sleigh (automobile.) Located in the parking lot of Santa Anita Racetrack, Reindeer Road offers an exuberant drive through-light experience, perfect for a car load of kids or Christmas-light seeking adults.

Produced by World of Illumination, which holds the title as the producer of the world’s largest drive-through animated light show, has brought their illumination nights to Arcadia.

The exhibition opened Thanksgiving weekend, and will be running through January 2nd. Synchronized to pop and holiday music, the road leads guests under glittery, light changing tunnels, past polar bears and ice caves, blue sparkling mountains, leaping reindeer, happy gingerbread men, and a glowing version of the North Pole.

The event traverses over a million square feet that contains 250,000 glittering lights.

The colors and general jubilance is delightful, and it’s easy to get into the spirit of the season and starting singing along to those rocking holiday songs.

“World of Illumination prides itself on creating immersive experiences that push boundaries when it comes to audio-visual and drive-through entertainment. We’re not just about creating spectacles in our work. Our team of artists, engineers, designers, and technicians are passionate about telling stories, and that is reflected in Reindeer Road,” according to event marketing partner Stacey Kole at Branded Pros.

Reindeer Road was developed by a team of artists and technicians led by creative director Aaron Curry, who has also worked in lighting design for theatre and opera.

The company runs 4 other events events in Arizona and Georgia; this is their first year in Los Angeles, the land of the automobile. It should be a tailor-made experience for the region.

Reindeer Road‘s vibrant, dancing, and colorful LED lights and state-of-the-art displays are pure fun to drive through, and the attraction takes approximately 25 minutes to experience; when we went early in the run on a weeknight, it took us a little less time; if things are busy it may take longer. Either way, you’ll feel thoroughly “illuminated.” Ticket cost is per vehicle so you can scoop up everyone and go “laughing all the way.”

Weekday vehicle passes start at $59; Dasher fast passes are $79; weekends are $69/$89. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit World of Illumination’s website.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis, drone shot provided by WOI

Happy Hauntings All Year Joy Ray Haunts in Ghost Visions

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Closing on Halloween and with a Zoom-friendly séance, Joy Ray’s Ghost Visions was perhaps the most seasonally accurate hosting of an art exhibition to appear in greater Los Angeles. The always provocative artist hosted a robust opening, a well-attended art talk, and the aforementioned magical séance, but it is Ray’s art itself which haunts with a lushly dark beauty.

Ghost Visions: A Joy Ray Solo Show, installation view

From black, dense, and fanciful sculptural work, such as the spooky “Diadem” and “The Futility of Consent,” to lushly textural wall art and mysterious plasma cut shapes on metal, Ray’s work here has an otherworldly quality that is entirely intentional.

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Fabric based wall art sometimes feels richly balanced, visceral both in terms of texture and visual layers. Like melted artifacts from a fire in a haunted house, her dimensional sculptures range from a blackened bat mobile with shiny black paint and a seeming growth of sand to a sand obscured blackened kneeling child figure in “Thoughts and Prayers.” These found objects made sculpture are perhaps the most spooky element of the exhibition, witty and dark, both literally and figuratively.

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Wall art includes materials with their own “past life,” materials and repurposed garments purchased at thrift stores, specifically the denim material used for jeans.  Much of this work has a metallic appearance, alight with a kind of inner, silvery glow, as with the striated “Spirit Duplicator.”

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Rusted metal pieces comprise other, smaller sculptures in which the artist has described her process of metal sculptural use as a process in which the conditions she creates in determine the final outcome – a collaboration, if you will, with the spirit world, or at least the environmental one. Standing rectangular works feature kinetic scrawls akin to a signature, wave like and not quite intelligible. These are the works the artist created during a six way stay at the Chicago School of the Arts Institute, using a CMT plasma cutter and a simple string as the basis from which to cut.  Each 4 x 11 piece has patterns cut directly into steel, and are reminiscent of a name plate, the kind a ghost or sea nymph would leave on an office desk.

Dark and experimental, Ghost Visions is also experiential – viewers could enjoy a haunted moment or two contemplating each work. The exhibition is also playful, an invitation into another realm. Some of the works are available for viewing through Shockboxx’s Artsy page, at

https://www.artsy.net/show/shockboxx-1-ghost-visions-a-joy-ray-solo-show?sort=partner_show_position. If you missed the show in person, or if you’d simply like to bring a little ghostly glamor into your life, be sure to make a visit

Sya Warfield Creates Pulp Idols

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Working in mixed media on wood, artist Sya Warfield has created a new series, Pulp Idols. Completed throughout the last year, seven of these layered works will open this weekend in a new Santa Clarita gallery space.

Consisting of seven, immediately recognizable images, Warfield used photographic pulp transfer, combined with water-based pigment inks, acrylic ink, crackle paste medium, metal leaf, vintage newsprint and spray paint.

Warfield’s work is quite alive in her depiction of iconic and well-known figures and the ideas associated with them. Elevating these images into fresh focus, the artist has shaped entirely original portraits, centering them in a way in which each individual’s character, cultural importance, and era, are also a part of each artwork.

Warfield says she chose to create “portraits of key figures who have effected change within our societies and cultural lives… [such as] controversial 1980s-era artist Keith Haring, pictured with one of his own designs on his t-shirt; and Andy Warhol, [with] heavy bangs across his eyes and a constellation of stars applied to his shoulders.”

Other images include those of Frida Kahlo, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Nelson Mandela, and Malala Yousafzai. A direct and intensive gaze is the dominant feature of the artist’s evocation of Kahlo; her works featuring Monroe and Madonna exude a hypnotic sense of both power and sexuality that pull the viewer into these popular stars’ worlds.

She also includes a kindly smiling Mandela and a serene yet watchful image of Yousafzai. While the latter two images are inextricably bound to global politics and just causes, and Kahlo is a passionate icon for art and women’s issues, Warhol, Haring, Monroe, and Madonna are true pop – or pulp – idols.

According to Warfield, “The series invites viewers to reflect on the complexity of life, the passing of time and the ongoing ripples of influence we experience and can exert positively in the world.”

The work also includes a message rooted in “elements of the Japanese notion of Wabi Sabi, deliberate imperfection. There are spiritual elements to this series which include the energies that surround [these] people supported by colors and textures,” Warfield says.

Each image seems to emerge from the wood it is created upon, as if rising from underwater, or the passage of time. It has a resonance that builds upon the featured image, transforming and elevating it. The viewer might consider not only each subject as an icon in society, but due to the image Warfield creates from it, as an updated and secular evocation of a worshipped religious icon.

Her images have layered, gilded quality reminiscent of the Byzantine images that decorated churches from the 4th century on. In a way, the viewer can see Warfield’s idols as just as venerated in our modern culture as the figures of early saints.

Pulp Idols represents just one aspect of Warfield’s work. The artist has created images using photography, video, and mixed media, including the process used in her current work utilizing the “photographic pulp transfer process combined with water-based pigment inks and acrylic inks,” along with a variety of other elements.

“My work has definitely evolved over the years,” Warfield asserts, explaining that she is always seeking new challenges. She’s specifically looking forward “to working bigger and creating installations. I want viewers to be curious, inspired, and hopeful.”

To that end, Warfield has also recently completed a public art commission of 2 utility boxes in Del Rey.

Her current Pulp Idols exhibition is on view starting this weekend in Santa Clarita’s new Canyon Country Community Center. The show opens October 30 at 10 a.m. and runs until December 16th.

Santa Clarita’s new cultural hub, the community center is located at 18410 Sierra Highway, Canyon Country, CA, 91387.

The exhibition is also on view virtually on artsteps.com.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist

Cultural Undertow Will Pull You In

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There is something quite wonderful in the Cultural Undertow, something that allows the viewer to be pulled into the waters of observation willingly, and rebaptized in them. Curated by artist Narsiso Martinez, at Luna Anais Gallery in the Tin Flats exhibition space, Cultural Undertow offers a variety of works by two exciting LA-based artists, Gloria Gem Sánchez and Tidawhitney Lek.

Working in acrylic and oil, Lek’s exquisitely rendered figurative works shape involving depictions of viscerally recognizable moments in time, each filtered through a highly feminine and feminist sensibility. In one painting, a sinewy man, looking away from the viewer, glancing back toward a sunset sky, is carrying a bright pink bucket and one very large koi in Lek’s “Between the Bucket and the Sun.”

In another, a female cat and dog, rear ends directed our way, vibrant sky and brilliant orange and yellow flowers as background, serve as a prescient double entendre in “The Pussy and the Bitch.” In another lovely work, “Encounter,” dark clouds rim an intense patch of blue, and a wall, topped by flowers, separate a woman’s face from the reaching, hands and multi-colored nails of another woman on the other side of the wall. It’s both elliptical short story and mystery – they could be a couple separated but longing to see one another, they could wish each other harm. The dark clouds and that brilliant sky – it portends many things.

Regardless of subject, Lek’s use of startlingly vivid color, floral elements, and an underpinning of longing mark her as fresh and fascinating, a highly original talent taking both the figurative and the feminist to an entirely new and heightened level.

Sanchez’s work is entirely different, and yet Martinez’ thoughtful, conversational curation binds the two artists’ works into a cohesive and immersive experience. Sanchez offers a variety of lush mediums here. Her richly blue cyanotypes are haunting, some, as in the otherworldly figure revealed in “Twin Spirit” (far left), literally seem so; others are more abstract. Her archival photographs, like Lek’s paintings, revel in original portrayals of floral elements that celebrate personal heritage.

Perhaps most involving are her mixed media works, from woven, vividly colored wall work such as the tapestry that is “Nocturne Before Dawn” to her more sculptural work, each evoking something of the mystical and ritualistic, like “Araw (Sun),” consisting of a mix of shed snakeskin, bamboo, hojas de maiz, and faux hair. There is a strong element of the spiritual, even mystical, in each of these works.

Both artists’ work arises in part from their family’s cultural roots; for Sanchez it is a Xicana-Filipina heritage and for Lek, it is Cambodian. Martinez, having celebrated his own heritage through art, including a profound sense of respect and honor revealed in paintings of Mexican farmworkers in America, is no stranger to introducing intelligent cultural references and encouraging a broadening of viewer understanding and experience through art. His attention to intimate detail and his passionate respect for often under-represented communities is fully evident in this gracious, 18-work show.

And while representing those outside the standard artistic mainstream, Cultural Undertow also serves as a galvanizing focal point for the diversity, beauty, and electrifying wonder that celebrates a variety of family backgrounds as well as an intensely feminine point of view. Perhaps most profoundly of all, the art allows us to see all of these elements as part of a beautiful, universally relatable and recognizable whole.

The exhibition is on view at Luna Anais at Tin Flats, located at 1989 Blake Avenue, Los Angeles,  through July 24th.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis