We’ve waxed on enthusiastically here about the wonderful scene at the StART Up, and we’ll recap the vast and captivating LA Art Show coming up later this week. But first: a smaller scale art fair, and one with it’s own inventive and exceptional art work.
Held in the funky and fun indoor/outdoor Willow Studios in DTLA, Fabrik was one of the four art shows to draw art patrons and lovers across Los Angeles.
The driving idea behind Fabrik’s entry: the convergence of art, design, and architecture.
KATMOBL art car by LA artistJT Burke and the Botart Installation International Barrel Art were two of the outdoor installations worth braving a very-non-LA chilly weekend to see.
Artist Petra Eiko, below, created celestial, glowing works that evoked the origins of planets.
Below: the eyes have it.
MAS ATTACK 11 by Arta Curatorial featured a variety of terrific artists with individual pieces. Below, Kio Griffith.
Above two MAS ATTACK 11 artists exhibiting their vibrant works: Hung Viet Nguyen, and David Leadman.
Above, Steven Wolkoff with one of his richly layered, visually immersive three-dimensional words-in-paint pieces (top work). Wolkoff’s “word piles” began as a response to Anish Kapoor’s 1000 Names, a meditation on the absurd attempts to fight life’s impermanence.
Below, ceramic artist Sharon Hardy, with her layered, works that appear to have the texture of feathers and cloth.
The neon art created by Cleon Peterson and Lisa Schulte was fresh and engaging.
Below, Sonia Payes sculptures create a mysterious aura, the off-spring perhaps of sculptural parents on Easter Island.
Overall, Fabrik Expo opened its doors to a bevy of fresh, emerging artists in an accessible space. We’re betting that next year, more inventive artists and art collectives will be a part of this show.
Kenny Irwin has created a kingdom far more magical than Walt Disney’s. In the middle of Palm Springs’ Movie Colony district, Irwin has crafted giant sculptures of robots, animals, and all sorts of other-worldly creatures – a thousand tons of art work, according to the artist – and placed them at his and his father’s four-acre property. It’s a mix of The Nightmare Before Christmas, Iron Giant, science fiction, and yes, Disneyland style, with the fusion of these elements an artistic wonder that will blow viewers’ minds.
“I started making art as a baby,” the 41-year-old Irwin relates. “I always knew I was an artist. It’s kind of like when a cat is a kitten, it knows it’s a cat.”
Some 29,000 visitors so far have passed through Irwin’s sculptural works, primarily during the holiday season when the installations are lit up like a million jewels with sparkling, multi-colored, marvelous webs of lights. It takes several months to set up the light display, but Irwin works on his art constantly throughout the year.
He displays it year ’round, too, and visitors are welcome for a small donation. What will they see? Marvelous works created using scraps and discards from neighbors and pieces bought on eBay. Irwin often makes some of his large pieces right on the spot. Highlights include a “bird bot” with “feathers” made of pallet boards, and 500-feet of rail track made from lawn chairs.
“I visualize my works in my head, completely. Nothing is planned or stored, in my memory indefinitely,” the artist relates.
One enormous, fifty-ton piece was made when he was only eighteen years old, and took him two months to create.
Irwin was kind enough to take us up onto platforms above his mammoth sculptures for a view 30-feet off the ground of his spectacular installations.
He works in 43 different mediums today, and built his first robot at age 9, a 10-foot tall wooden figure with an antique phone imbedded in its chest. Irwin often uses old appliances and fixtures – from microwaves, which he holds in high disdain, to toilets.
Irwin offers an array of smaller pieces for sale. Above and below, beautifully wrought, hand-fired skulls are filled with common substances from Cheerios to marbles, costume jewelry to sports souvenirs.
His edgy but whimsical work was a part of a major exhibition in Baltimore, Md. in 2013, held at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. To fit his enormous sculptures inside, the museum’s front doors and a wall needed to be removed.
It goes without saying, then, that Irwin needs a large space – and one larger than he has now – for his works. In fact, he envisions creating his own amusement park one day.
Can art, writ large, be this much fun, this original, this life-consuming, this much of a legacy? Yes. And it’s a must-see for any art lover, anywhere. If you live in SoCal, don’t wait until next holiday season, get a tour of this impressive installation now, and then be sure to mark your calendars for a light-strung glowing visit post-Thanksgiving.
The International City Theatre in Long Beach is hosting a powerhouse of a musical through March 6th. And by musical, we mean all music, all the time.
There’s not a word of spoken dialog here, instead audiences find some twenty five story-songs composed by lyricist Richard Maltby Jr., with lush music by David Shire. This off-Broadway classic is extremely well served by its vibrant and versatile cast members who combine strong voice with often heartbreaking emotion.
The stories these songs tell are of love – of life, of relationships -boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife, love lost, found, illicit, sexual, platonic, desired, and abandoned.
With no spoken dialog how does it work? Think vignettes, musical vignettes, think clear voices, spirited delivery, and a mix of the comic and the tragic. Highlights include the absolutely riveting tale of the loss of a marriage and the life of a liberated woman sung by Valerie Perri, “Life Story,” and the rageful, hilarious “You Wanna Be My Friend” sung by Katheryne Penny when she discovers her boyfriend just wants to be friends.
On the distaff side, the men in the cast are no musical slouches either. Kevin Bailey’s loving father/son tribute “If I Sing,” is also a heart-melter. Adam von Almen’s “One Of The Good Guys,” a tribute to fidelity and lost chances both, is also deeply moving.
And let’s not forget the music supporting these stand-out, indefatigable singers. Theater music director Gerald Sternbach on grand piano and Brad Babinski on bass.
When viewing this production, we had no idea that the play was not an original production for ICT. The fact that it’s a classic piece of theater makes it no less vital – this “Closer than Ever” is “Fresher than Ever” thanks to its incredible cast and simply great score.
The International City Theatre is located in the Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach
February 24 through 28, Scottsdale, Ariz. will transform from an urbane Phoenix suburb in the desert to a place to explore the beauty and magic of water as an art form. The arid landscape is the perfect backdrop to an annual festival presented by the Scottsdale Public Art and Salt River Project, featuring 12 large scale interactive artworks by local and international artists, comprising the Canal Convergence Art + Water + Light Festival. One of the highlights of the festival will be the large scale water and light installation created by Los Angeles-based art collective, Aphidoidea.
Aphidoidea’s 600-foot piece is titled Spiraling Droplets. It’s designed to reveal the graceful and elegant shape and beauty of a water droplet. To take that shape and create such a massive work yields a visual experience somewhat like projecting and magnifying a minute and delicate image from beneath a microscope, or like viewing a dazzling array of distant stars magnified through a telescope. In other words, taking a small and perfect idea – water droplets – and writing them large results in an astonishing work that features two water splashes, each containing 15 illuminated water droplets. These droplets grow progressively in size and shape, mimicking still-motion images of a water drop expanding. The pattern recreates the shapes and movements of water ripples and currents. Thirty droplets will float the length of the piece over the canal waters south of the Marshall Way Bridge at the Scottsdale Waterfront.
A dream-like lighting sequence illuminates the droplets, creating the effect of natural light reflected on water. Running water, falling snow, a shower on a rainy day, and the reflections of light on a swimming pool are represented, as are larger scale water landscapes such as rainbows rising over clouds of mist and icy glaciers breaking.
Spiraling Droplets literally and figuratively reveals the variety of shapes that water can create. Liquid, crystal, gas: these mutations that water makes have within them a wide variety of forms from snowflake crystals to softly spun clouds, wavering mist, and plummeting droplets. Many of these shapes are close to intangible to human sight, and yet we know of these shapes, and the feelings they evoke. While we may have never examined the intricacies of a snowflake with the naked eye, we know how they should look, and the wintery magic they invoke. The elegant beauty of a water droplet’s pulsating shape is again, emotionally imagined, but heretofore visually uncaptured. Spiraling Droplets allows viewers to see the process of a droplet forming and falling by a kind of stop motion technique which creates still views of that precious droplet within thousandths of a second.
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The Aphidoidea collective was entranced with the image and idea of a single droplet and its perfect transitions in shape and size – in a way, it’s wet universe contained in that single drop. It’s that vastness that is expanded and expressed at the astonishing exhibition in Scottsdale.
Aphidoidea itself is an art, design and architecture collective that creates site-specific art installations that engage and inspire viewers while enhancing the environment. Collective members Jesus Eduardo Magaña, Paulina Bouyer-Magana, Jackie Muñoz, and Andrew Hernandez, craft art that explores and stimulates each site, through a combination of a conceptual approach, a variety of materials, interaction and perception.
Initial site-specific installations have evolved for the collective, as their pieces have grown to include response and interaction from viewers.
Based in Los Angeles, Aphidoidea has exhibited in the Boca Raton Museum of Art, the City of Long Beach, Inner City Arts, YMCA, in the City of Santa Monica, and at Burning Man. Recent exhibits have included installations for the Coachella Music and Art Festival, and public works at the Red Rocks College Metro Station for Denver’s Regional Transportation District and the city of Golden, Colorado. In 2010, the collective created the Icup II_Synthetic Landscape, which used 4,000 paper cups and 15,000 staples, to suspend the cups and create an entirely new spatial experience. The exhibition was held at Phantom Galleries, which places temporary installations in vacant storefronts throughout the Los Angeles area. Using the ordinary material of a paper cup, the installation took that unremarkable object and transformed it into a vibrant component of an other-worldly design, an abstract landscape that literally became alive with motion through a motion/heat sensor that activated a crankshaft to rotate the cups.
Water is a more mutable form to begin with, and Aphidoidea’s blurring of the lines between art and technology should be a perfect match for such a shifting, enigmatic medium. The Aphidoidea team integrates skills in metal sculpture, intuitive architectural design, large scale art works, traditional art mediums from acrylics to water color, and found art forms. This multi-disciplinary collective utilizes materials and technologies such as CNC prototyping, 3D modeling, lighting, and interactive graphics.
Whatever their methodology, the results Aphidoidea accomplishes are magical creations that fuse technology with wonder.
