Diversions LA

Bombay Beach Biennale: Sweet and Surreal

Posted on March 28, 2018 by Diversions LA

The Bombay Beach Biennale is an art festival that doesn’t so much take over the small town of Bombay Beach as it does grow from it, a series of art works, performances, and installations that is both sweet and surreal.

Above photo by Nicole Saari

Let’s start with the town. It’s a small community nestled against the shores of the Salton Sea. Just as the sea itself has been shrinking from lack of water, so has the town been shrinking; with its neat pre-fab homes and small cottages sharing street space with abandoned, broken properties. There is one bar, the Ski Inn, with dollar-bill-covered walls, burgers and fries, and generous drinks; a small convenience store; and an American Legion Post. And the wind swept, dusty, fish-bone sand of the sea.

Above photo by Nicole Saari

The sea itself is like an art installation. It wasn’t put there by nature, but by an accidental flood. It’s brilliant waters – smelly in the summer months from agricultural run-off – reflect the harshly beautiful desert landscape, the more distant mountains, the sky and clouds. It is a mirror of nature, an anomaly of nature, beauty that is being let to die. The sea needs water.

And yet. There is life in the sea and in the town yet. And the art festival plays upon that life, helping to revive, drawing attention to the plight of the sea, the not-quite-forgotten town, and the wonder and awe of something magnificent yet out of place.

That is what the sea itself is, of course, but it is also the Bombay Beach Biennale. Who put a cool art show in such a remote spot? Who limited attendance to 500 so as not to overwhelm the town or its limited services? Who decided what seemingly random collection of exhibitions, lectures, dance, and music fit together?

The BBB rotates dates each year, but functions as an annual version of a true Biennale, a gypsy-caravan, a mini-Burning Man, an outsider art fest, a tribute to the land, its strangeness, its beauty.

Above, Ashkenazy, left; Haberny, right

The Bombay Beach Biennale, which started late on a March Friday this year and ran to 1 p.m. on Sunday, was once a wild dream. Now, it’s an immersive art experience founded by experiential artist and Petit Ermitage Hotel co-owner Stefan Ashkenazy along with Tao Ruspoli, and Lily Johnson White. Underground New York-based artist Greg Haberny first created and exhibited here at an abandoned property that he turned into The Hermitage Museum in Bombay Beach, and has lived off and on here for the last two years.

“The project in Bombay Beach is highly euphoric, and very supportive to the needs of the area,” Haberny says, noting that the region around the sea is already home to the art community of East Jesus in nearby Slab City, and the folk art masterpiece of Salvation Mountain.

And Ashkenazy adds that he knew Bombay Beach was the right place for his event “the moment I set foot there. The idea came to me to convert it, using it as a canvas, and turning the town into an immersive installation of Gonzo art.”

In other words: strange and beautiful art to match a strange and beautiful place. And somehow merge with it, so that it was not so much a taking over of the town but a revelatory look at another dimension of it.

Here are a few highlights for me:

Olivia Steele’s simply awe-inspiring ruby red neon sculpture, suspended on posts in the sea and connected with a generator. “Save Me” — meaning both the sea, the town, and every viewer in need of saving which is every one of us, of course. Likewise, her “Trust the Process” a work in purple inside a shell of a house in Bombay Beach Estates, the most derelict section of town, hits the heart as well as the eye.

Above night photo by Sarah DeRemer

Also on the beach: The Tesseract, a small-house sized representation of a 4 dimensional hypercube by S. Shigley aka Shig, with glowing, other-worldly lighting design by Jessica Steiner and Ashley Hillis.

Above photo by Anya Kaats

The Bombay Beach Opera House – A dilapidated house that has been transformed into a permanent structure, a state-of-the-art performing arts space masterminded by artist James Ostrer housed a variety of performances. The theater walls are covered with flip flops abandoned by refugees, many from Nigeria. Surrealist paintings are hung as a backdrop against the sky blue/aqua painted stage.

Saturday evening, San Francisco Ballet prima ballerina Maria Kotchekova and her partner Sebastian Kloberg were followed by a Clown Opera by Kate Feld.

Above photo, Sarah DeRemer

Greg Haberny’s Hermitage Museum, offered a new exhibition Why Do I Destroy Everything I Love? featuring works by Haberny and artists Camille Schefter, Thomas Linder, Jon Pylypchuk, Bill Saylor, and Theodore Boyer. The Museum, like the opera house, is a permanent gift to the town. Tours are available upon request – post-festival, visitors can ask Steve at the Ski Inn. Giant cloth sculptures of cigarettes; twigs suspended from the ceiling painted to resemble cigarettes, terrific assemblage works throughout the museum and patio.

Above photo by Nicole Saari

Another permanent installation is the Bombay Beach Drive-In, a wonderful conceit featuring car shells and other vehicles parked before an outdoor screen. For the festival, screenings were of films dedicated to the theme of Sea of Love: Monsters in the Water. The glittery drive-in sign, fires in big iron drum trash cans made a pretty terrific scene after dark.

The Bombay Beach Institute of Particle Physics, Metaphysics & International Relations is part museum/gallery, part performance space and home to a new Community Garden. Here, we visited a gallery with ghostly images, enjoyed statues such as the Venus of Salton in the garden, and listened to a pretty cool lecture – and lectures aren’t my thing – about God, music, and silence by Oxford University philosopher Mark Wrathall, Columbia University professor and activist Christia Mercer, and author Christopher Ryan among others.

Possibly my favorite off-the-beach installation was Angler Grove, a silver and mirrored disco/bachelor pad created by artist Randy Polumbo. So shiny. From the glittering foam steps to the silvery sink-in couches, this was a wonderful, alien planet. Hoping that this, too, is a permanent structure – the detail was incredible.

Above photo by Amanda Vandenberg

There were a wide range of individual pieces that stood out: “Nine” at the Bombay Beach Botanical Gardens, a giant porcelain flower by artist Yassi Mazandi; Jennifer Korsen’s giant hearts and gold-painted cracks in her “Home is Where the Heart Is” installation, the exotic coffee bar of Cafe Bosna, Sean Guerrero’s haunting skeletal “Death Ship” on the sand, light sculptures dancing in the wind along Ave. E; a street parade; the final event of the festival on Sunday, a dance party surrounded by wonderful wooden cut outs that highlighted the desolation and wonder of the sea, and yes, again, its surrealism.

Photo above by Tao Ruspoli

Photo above by Sarah DeRemer

Can you go next year? Maybe you can, if you look closely and follow us here at DiversionsLA. And – if most importantly of all, you look to the sea, consider joining a fight for its survival, and think of art as your weapon, your shield, and perhaps even your savior.

Next up, a first person account of the event by a photographer and musician who has loved the Salton Sea for years and written music inspired by it.

Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis, additional photos individually credited

Treasured Again: A Trove of Miniature Assemblage Art

Posted on March 23, 2018March 23, 2018 by Diversions LA

The magical, miniature world of assemblage art dollhouses are on display this Sunday at TATABA in Santa Monica, where shop owner and assemblage artist Gilena Simons offers a reception into her perfectly detailed world.

TATABA itself will be going on hiatus at the end of April and preparing for a reopen next year as a hybrid art gallery and vintage shop in a new location just across the street. The exhibition is a taste of things to come, in terms of Simons delightfully detailed artwork.

Simons collects and reuses once-treasured vintage items in her work, and with this exhibition presents a varied palette of materials.

Works on display include “Love Letters – War Torn,” made with ephemera including fragments of correspondence from a U.S. Navy officer to his wife during WWII, above; and “Black Pearl – The Josephine Baker House,” a tribute to the legendary entertainer and French resistance agent, below.

“I am especially interested in the amount of time and resources it takes to amass a collection, whether stamps or matchbooks, buttons or love letters, only to have it one day become meaningless and end up in a stranger’s — my –hands,” Simons explains. “I feel a responsibility to honor time and chance by providing new homes for lost or forgotten things.”

She began working in assemblage for a simple reason, she attests. “Easy answer: I’m an artist who can’t draw lol. Seriously though, I always knew I was… able to put together attractive vignettes. I didn’t know it had a name – assemblage – until I was already doing it.”

This show includes a benefit portion – a portion of proceeds from sales will benefit OUR HOUSE Grief Support Center.

“I was widowed 20 years ago and met my ex-husband, whose wife also died, in a bereavement group at Our House. Besides the obvious ‘house’ reference, my work deals with loss and finding new purpose and meaning, so it is a good fit,” the artists relates.

Simons wants viewers to know that her work is a collection – of time. “Not just my time as an artist – but the total time it took for all of the other unknown individuals to design, create, and collect the components assembled in each piece. I also want people to think about chance and the coincidences crucial in order for any of us to meet and find meaning in arbitrary happenstance,” she says.

According to Simons, the store’s closing is really an art opening in Simon’s eyes. TATABA will reopen with a focus on monthly exhibitions and events, tying art with vintage home décor and fashion.

As for the future, Simons plans to spend the next year getting permits from the City of Santa Monica and the Coastal Commission to renovate and restore a historic building at 2914 Main Street to house her new gallery and shop.

“Once renovations are completed, my new space will house an art gallery featuring underrepresented and local artists with an emphasis on assemblage artists, as well as a rotating selection of highly curated vintage home décor and fashion. Stay tuned for the grand re-opening,” she enthuses.

And visit TATABA this weekend Saturday, March 24, 11AM-7PM, and Sunday, March 25, 12-6PM. A reception with beverages and bites will be held on Sunday from 3 to 6. TATABA is presently located at 2823 Main Street, Santa Monica, CA 90405.

Migrations: Cynthia Minet’s Sculptures Take Flight

Posted on March 15, 2018 by Diversions LA

Ethereal work created from the most prosaic of materials – that’s the wonderful, rich dichotomy of Cynthia Minet’s glowing new work. Crafted from recycled materials and LED lights, Minet’s has created a stunning series of six sculptures of the Roseate Spoonbill, a large bird native to the Southeast coastal region, and serving here as an artistic surrogate for human experiences.

The works, titled Migrations, are now winging their way to the International Museum of Art and Science (IMAS) in McAllen, Texas, for a show opening April 14^th and running through September 2^nd. Next year, in January 2019, we’ll be able to see these beauties in flight again at the Museum of Art and History (MOAH) in Lancaster.

In the meantime, Minet explains her process. “I build an armature first out of PVC based on the skeleton of the animal I am making. I find images of the skeleton and usually make a life size drawing, and then I measure bone to PVC pipe to get the proportions,” she explains.

Minet also examines photos of the animal and videos, making drawings to refer to as she builds. Once she’s ready, she cuts plastic and laundry detergent bottles which makes up much of her work materials. “I wash and remove labels, and then cut it up and piece it to represent the various parts of the animal.”

Minet has worked with materials from steel to fabrics to resin, but found the pollutant aspects of them to be difficult to work with. “The thing that is great about the plastic is that I can cut it without having to generate a lot of dust. I don’t melt it, I try to keep it as clean for my lungs as I can.”

She came upon the idea to use recycled plastic when on a trip to Italy in 2009. “I met someone who had a nightclub where they showed art work, and it was right next door to a recycling facility. I had been making these ceramic pieces based on cloning and genetic modification of animals, and the guy said do you want to do a show. I said I could do ceramics and he said, well this is a night club and those are too fragile.” He suggested using recycling materials from the facility near his club instead, and Minet was inspired. “I had just seen a show in Finland that used fiber optics, and I just had this idea of using the recycled material with lights inside them. The nightclub show in Padova, Italy never happened, but I brought those ideas back here.”

She created a one-night show at POST gallery using these materials, and then started to work from exhibit to exhibit, embracing the poignancy of using these man-made industrial materials to shape beautiful beings.

“What I’m after is capturing the essence of life, a sense of life and movement, and that’s why I try to make them so realistic but at the same time keeping the materials they are made of visible. I want to have a handle on or an edge or a recycled sign on them, something that links the material to the form.”

Minet says she is after many layers of meaning in her work. “I hope viewers will be drawn to the work by the light and the color and the form, first. Then once they are drawn in, that they will look at it, and come to a realization of what the materials are, and start to grasp the deeper ecological messages within the work. The materials are made from petrochemicals, from plastic that will never go away, and from using the electricity we are so dependent on. They’re all about dependencies in a certain way.”

The Texas exhibition came about through a solo exhibition Minet has at USC’s Fisher Museum. The museum curator was a USC alum and received press on Minet’s work and invited her to the border region.

“I found that I could move the work beyond an ecological message into a political one, to make it really relevant to all of the issues having to do with immigration that we are having to deal with right now, and link the vulnerability of the roseate spoonbill as a kind of poster child for ecological issues in the Gulf Coast region,” Minet says. “Like most of my sculptures, the animals are sort of surrogates for human experience, so I linked the vulnerability of the spoonbill to the vulnerability of people needing to cross the border.” According to the artist, “There are a lot of materials that I found along the border that were dropped by immigrants, and I incorporated those into the sculpture, because I wanted people to notice and be pointed toward that issue and the real sympathy I have to that vulnerability, and the resilience of those people in that situation.

To collect those materials, Minet visited the area along the Rio Grande border crossing with a biologist, and also met with activist and artist Scott Nicholl who provided her with materials such as Homeland Security bags, used to contain detained immigrants’ possessions.

The solo exhibition in Texas will fill a 60-foot gallery, and is site specific work that directly refers to McAllen’s position on the central flyway corridor.

“There are three different avian flyways that converge in the area, and birds migrate down to Central and South America from there,” Minet notes. “But this is really a project that speaks about both avian and human migration… it came from researching the location, and in our current political climate, looking at migratory birds, I wanted to add the specific issues there in the fascinating liminal space of the borderlands.”

Minet is intensely aware that the border is simply an imposition on the land, one that constrains not just humans but also animals in their natural migratory habitat. This dimension to her work is new for the artist; also new is a collaboration on lighting with Vaughn Hannon.

“He worked with me to create programmable LED lights and animation and color. He’s responsible for that, for the know-how on motion sensors and sound. I’ve been working with LED lights and stringing them together, but this is the first time to make programmable lighting. We saw there and made up the animation – it was like painting with the lights,” she smiles.

The glowing sculptures truly soar. Wish them well as they wing across the country to southeast Texas, and be sure to plan a visit when they make their own migration back to California again.

For more information on Minet’s Migrations, visit

http://theimasonline.org/
http://cynthiaminet.com/

Get in the Huddle at Shoebox Projects

Posted on March 14, 2018March 13, 2018 by Diversions LA

You won’t want to miss Huddle #2.

Opening March 17th, the 2nd postcard art show at Shoebox Projects at the Brewery Art Lofts is the #equalityforall #resist postcard art show. Hosted by Shoebox Projects and Art and Cake and curated
by Kristine Schomaker, all work is donated to the show and sold for $25 each. 100% of proceeds will be donated equally to the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the Trevor Project. Payable by check, cahs, or card at the reception, you’ll get incredibly reasonably priced art, political action, and a warm and welcoming group of like-minded folks all rolled into one.

According to Schomaker, “After the first Women’s March, they had a list of ten things you could do in a hundred days to support others and get the word out. One of the things was called a huddle. You get together with your community, invite people over and have a kind of get together to discuss other ways you can get your voices heard. It is kind of like a weight being lifted off your shoulder. Just knowing you are not alone is huge.”

From there, Schomaker decided that she without much time to volunteer – she is running several businesses and creating her own art – she decided to do a huddle that involved art. “It’s in my wheel house, it’s what do. And I thought about a post card show. Why not put the word out and far and wide, and have people all over the world send in post cards that have to do with equality. ”

With her first Huddle, Schomaker received 200 post cards with sales benefitting Planned Parenthood, the Trevor Project, and ACLU.

“And it was just amazing to see these voices speaking out, it brought tears to my eyes to see we weren’t alone. So I had leftovers and I just found an opening in my schedule for the project space, and put out a call for more postcards. Now I have a couple hundred more and I am still waiting for more to come in the mail.”

Why choose mailing the postcards uncovered, and receiving postmarks on the work? “I wanted it to go through the USPO, I wanted the eyes of those government workers to see them.” However, she notes with a laugh, people still sent the cards in envelopes, ignoring her instructions.

Along with new works and more expanded origin points – including Texas, Madrid, Canada, and New York; the new show with a call for art which was promoted solely through social media, has one other change. Rather than a hard and fast payment, Schomaker decided “I’m saying a suggested donation of $25, I wanted anyone who wanted to buy one to buy one. That way we could sell more. Hopefully that will get people to buy them,” she explains.

To have a handle on truth in the face of cultural gas-lighting, and to experience true community and know you’re not alone in these highly charged, polarized political times, head to Shoebox Projects on Saturday from 3-5 and go home with an inexpensive yet supremely valuable work of art and sense of belonging.

Shoebox Projects is located at 660 South Avenue 21 #3 in the Brewery in DTLA near Lincoln Heights.

Go.

Genie Davis; photos by Kristine Schomaker

Heather Lowe
April 29, 2026 at 7:09 am
on Transformations: A Review by Betty Brown
wonderful
Nancy Mooslin
April 29, 2026 at 6:35 am
on Transformations: A Review by Betty Brown
Beautiful review Betty!! I am looking forward to seeing this exhibit on Sunday!
Karena Massengill
April 24, 2026 at 2:50 pm
on Wonders Immerse at Angels Gate
Yes, both exhibitions are breathtaking! Well, worth the effort of going to see them while you still can!
Karena Massengill
April 24, 2026 at 11:11 am
on Quantum Beauty in Quantum Matter at Matter Studio Gallery
Thank you for this thoughtful review! I am honored to have my artwork be exhibited with these other powerful artists.
Angelica Sotiriou
April 22, 2026 at 5:34 pm
on Quantum Beauty in Quantum Matter at Matter Studio Gallery
Beautifully written. It was an incredible show. Thank you for the review.