Under the Sea: Jelly Dreamscapes and Tiny Brilliant Frogs Dazzle at Aquarium of the Pacific

Posted on by Diversions LA

A dazzling display of undersea life is currently on display at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. Almost celestial, the Jelly Dreamscapes exhibit is offers a vast array of sea jellies. From more common species to rarer types, these fascinating creatures are hypnotic, delicate, and diverse.

The exhibition is thoughtfully laid out, with an entrance display that features informative video screens and a vast “lake” with shifting, mesmerizing pastel lights playing off the incandescent jellies floating there.

From there, visitors are invited to wander among the curved aquariums, watching these beautiful and mysterious creatures float and swim through their respective spaces. While sea jellies have no heart, brains, or gills, they are so wondrously alive that the viewer remains riveted by these amazing beings.

Each consists of three main parts, the bell — the umbrella or bulbous shaped top which propels their movement, tentacles that are designed to sting and immobilize prey (and of course a luckless human or two), and arms or flaps that move their prey to their stomach or broods.

Sea jellies primarily consume zooplankton, small crustaceans, fish, or other jellies; they range in size from as small the eraser on a pencil to a vast presence not present in the aquarium said to be larger than a blue whale.  They’re close related to to sea anemones and coral, a fascinating fact learned at the exhibition. Even more awe inspiring, jellies have existed even before dinosaurs roamed the planet.

Watching the various jellies is rather like seeing a rainbow: they shift within their watery world, emanating a kind of mute beauty and grace that makes visitors spend copious amounts of time just watching them be alive. Some appeared completely translucent, others more colorful. Some were marbled, some were milky, some were spotted, some lacy, some have long, dangling tentacles, others have small, eyelash-like tentacles that blink and sway. Warty comb jellies are not true sea jellies in that they do not sting, but their tiny cilia form light prisms that dance with color.

This is a completely wonderful, gaspingly beautiful exhibition that should not be missed.

Equally riveting is the aquarium’s Frogs: Facing a Challenging World. Brilliantly colorful and often quite minute, the frogs on exhibit reveal wildly different ecological adaptations from poisonous responses to astounding camoflage. Here you’ll find the bright blue poison dart frog, the panamanian golden frog, and the Magnificent Tree Frog. A frog nursery exhibition is particularly informative.

In the same area, a mysterious-looking axolotl – a salamander that remains with gills, tail, and body fin intact its entire life, is another fascinating creature to observe.

Elsewhere in the aquarium, you’ll find purple sea urchins, bright hyellow butterfly fish, a Cortez Rainbow Wrasse from the Gulf of California, a forest of green, red, and blue colored lorikeets, seals and sea lions, spiny lobsters, gigantic whiprays, zebra sharks, and a sea turtle, among other thoughtfully laid-out, experiential exhibits.

The aquarium is always an enchanting way to spend a day; don’t miss the Jelly Dreamscapes now through April 30, 2027 or the amazing, brilliantly colorful frogs.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis 

Lydia Nakashima Degarrod Offers Delicate Wonder in Intricate Sculptural Work

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Lydia Nakashima Degarrod is an artist with a deep passion for informing and compelling her viewers. Working internationally, but based in San Francisco, Degarrod says she is inspired by the relationship between place, memory, material, and human experience. “I am particularly interested in things that are not immediately visible—memories, dreams, traces of migration, histories embedded in landscapes, and the ways people make meaning of their surroundings.”

Her expansive knowledge in these areas has been influenced by her background in anthropology. “I am drawn to observing,
listening, walking, collecting, and spending time with a place before deciding what a work should become. Sometimes an idea begins with a material; at other times it begins with a story, a landscape, or a question. I am interested in allowing these elements to influence one another rather than beginning with a predetermined image.”

Over time, Degarrod’s art practice has morphed in many different ways while maintaining “certain concerns” about the world and life itself.

“I began with painting and printmaking, but over time I became increasingly interested in materials, processes, and the relationship between an artwork and the place in which it is made or experienced. The shift toward fiber, handmade paper, installation, and more research-based work allowed me to bring stories, archives, landscapes, dreams, memory, and lived experience more fully into my artmaking,” she says. She details the important methods she uses in her practice as being simply walking through this world and using her keen skills of observation.

“I don’t see my practice as moving from one style to another as much as expanding the questions I can ask through art. The materials have changed because the questions have changed,” she explains.

And speaking of materials, the artist works with mediums as diverse as handmade paper, natural and botanical fibers, textiles, printmaking, photography, drawing, sound, and installation.

She reveals that she is particularly drawn to “materials that have a history or a physical life of their own. Fiber is important to me because it can be transformed through processes of boiling, pounding, stretching, layering, stitching, and tearing. It carries both physical and metaphorical associations with connection, repair, migration, and transformation,” she attests.

Thematically, the artist is most interested in relationships: “between landscape, ecological change, memory, and migration and displacement. I think about landscapes not simply as physical environments, but as places where different histories, memories, and forms of knowledge accumulate.”

But this is not Degarrod’s only focus. “I am also continuing to explore dreams and altered forms of perception. Dreams have been a
significant part of my research for many years, and I am interested in how they can become a way of imagining landscapes and experiences that cannot be represented through conventional observation.”

She is excited about the future, and combining the different “strands of my practice together, research, walking, material experimentation, and installation—and allowing them to generate new forms rather than knowing in advance what the final work will look like.”

Degarrod has exhibited work at a wide range of global galleries and museums, including Diversions Fine Arts in Manhattan Beach, and upcoming exhibitions at Visions Museum of Textile Art in San Diego, Delta College, Gallery Route One, and Ohio
State University.  She is also curating two art exhibitions at the Southern Utah Museum of Art for 2028.

Concurrently, she is developing new work, with her interest focused on creating what she describes as “larger, site-
responsive installations and continuing my exploration of botanical fibers, landscape, memory, and ecological change.”

She wants her viewers to understand that the beautiful, highly intuitive work she creates is deeper than what they see exhibited.
“The materials and forms are invitations to think about what may be hidden beneath the visible surface—memories, histories, dreams, migrations, losses, and forms of knowledge that are often difficult to represent.”

According to Degarrod, “I also hope that the work creates a space for slowing down. I am interested in art that does not
necessarily provide an immediate answer, but creates a moment of attention and allows different associations to emerge. The work may begin with a specific story or place, but I want viewers to bring their own memories and experiences into that encounter.”

To do so, she often works with materials that are often natural and unique. The work may look delicate but they are not fragile: she is enormously interested in the fact that “resilience  can exist within materials that appear vulnerable.”

She explains that “Many of the fibers I use undergo intense physical transformation. I boil, pound, stretch, tear, layer, and reconstruct them. The process itself involves stress, resistance, and transformation. The materials may look delicate, but they can endure a great deal.”

She finds herself drawn to natural and botanical materials because “they connect the work directly to the physical world. Plants carry histories of place, migration, adaptation, healing, labor, and survival. When I work with them, I am interested not only in their visual qualities, but also in what they might allow me to think about.”

As an artist, she notes that “the apparent delicacy of the materials is part of the tension within the work. I am interested in how something that appears ephemeral or vulnerable can nevertheless carry histories and memories of remarkable endurance.”

She describes one work that is especially significant for her: the installation Scattered Seeds of the Cotton Bolls. Its creation and display allowed me to honor the memories of my family’s migration from Japan to Latin America.”

The process of creation was layered. “In creating the handmade paper, I combined mulberry fiber, associated with my Japanese
heritage, with yerba buena, an herb used in Latin America for healing physical ailments. Bringing these two plants together became a symbolic way of connecting the two cultural landscapes of my family’s history. It also became a way of addressing, through art, the suffering and displacement that accompanied their migration.”

Additionally she “created flowers from this handmade paper, and each flower became a way of holding fragments of my family’s memories. The flowers are not simply representations of those memories; they are material embodiments of them,” she says.  “The work is both material and deeply personal. It brings together ancestry, migration, healing, memory, and transformation. For me, its significance lies in turning an inherited history of displacement into a physical landscape of remembrance and symbolic healing.”

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist and by Davis 

Knott’s Scary Farm: Plenty of Fun and Chills

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Part of what makes Knott’s Scary Farm so much fun is literally getting lost in it. The nearly circular amusement park is kept dark and spooky with fog machines, wandering scareactors inhabiting themed scare zones from the Gore-ing 20’s to the wild west of Knott’s Ghost Town area, and the always-screamworthy coasters and other thrill rides operating with lights off.

In short, the theme park feels like a place where spooky shadows and grasping ghouls might dwell, and simply to be there is to feel the chills and join in the laughs and scares.

Spread out and spectacularly shadowy, the park lets guests literally and figuratively get lost in the Halloween myths that transform Knotts by night.

The scare zones were particularly effective this year, with scareactors catching guests unaware as they studied park maps or focused on consuming popcorn, giant chocolate chip cookies, Halloween themed cocktails, and the requisite slice of Mrs. Knott’s historic Boysenberry pie.

And of course there are mazes. New this year, Inked has a morbidly awesome mix of mad clown circus and wild and crazy animation history that puts the true “looney” into this macabre but delightful world in which wildly homicidal cartoon characters have come to life.  This maze is as  much dark ride fun house as jump scare haven. A particular treat are the rear projected inflatables with their crawly spider motif, which guests must push through. Also new this year is a well-done archeological dig themed maze, Unearthed. This maze offers mummies, moody and mysterious lighting, and monstrous animal hybrids roaming the dark.

The more venerable Cinema Slasher makes its eerie movie theater return with headless theater patrons, ominously dancing popcorn, and more, starting right at the ticket window.

There are ten mazes in all to mark Scary Farm’s 53rd year of fun scares, including Origins: The Curse of Calico and The Chilling Chambers, both in their final year. The latter maze is in enclosed in an eerie haunted cathedral setting externally but within, it houses a variety of highlight rooms from a mental hospital set to a zoo replete with farting elephants.

Mary – The Haunting of Worth Home, The Zoo, Widows, and Room 13 were all spooky scraems and laughs; the speakeasy theme of Room 13 was delightfully immersive, with a scareactor bartender offering imaginary libations before guests entered passages that recalled The Shining.

Stage shows include master magicians from The Magic Castle and voodoo queens evoking the haunted cemeteries of New Orleans.

It was rainy the night we attended, but that put no damper of the fun. Giant pumpkins, skeletons, and dark purple lighting alll sparkled with rain drops, while screams echoed off the terrifyingly steep Accelerator.

For a hauntingly good and yet still impressively lighthearted night of chills and thrills, Knott’s Scary Farm, now a part of the Six Flags family, beautifully walks the line between campy classics and truly chilling moments. Yes, you can laugh and scream at the same time. Knotts is located in Buena Park, Calif.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis

Carving Up Halloween Fun at Descanso Gardens

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Carved, the Halloween season attraction now at Descanso Gardens in La Canada-Flintridge, is a spooky joy for all ages. Open through November 1st, the magic of following an artistic trail of pumpkins through a winding overview of the gardens after dark remains potent.

Focused on the carving of jack o’lanterns, there is both a small house and a charming sea monster made of pumpkins, as well as as an entire field of grinning pumpkin heads and eerie scarecrow figures. Over a mile-long walk through the dark, eucalyptus scented gardens, the glowing orange pumpkins enchant.

While many of the set pieces remain the same as last year, some have moved or are expanded, and regardless, the beauty and family-friendly fun of Carved makes it an annual treat.

The Dia de los Muertos offrenda alter has expanded and is quite lovely, with faux candlelight dancing over the happy musician skeletons and paper and pencil available to create your own tribute to the dearly departed in your lives.

Pumpkin-head characters and a vast array of carved pumpkins, albeit not real pumpkins, which would never last for the run of the event, fill a tree-lined meadow.

But in the rose garden near the dessert station, massive real pumpkins are carved by artisans who can make highly detailed depictions of everything from key Dodgers baseball players to Dolly Parton.

The neon Rhizome light sculpture rises dramatically up from Descanso’s Oak Grove, while orange orbs literally float on water and the charming model trains have dinosaurs and monster figures alongside the tracks.

Guests can also enjoy the fun of a hay maze, the adorable and spooky wood spirits conjured – or rather cut – up by artist Chainsaw Jenna, and the simple wonder of trees, the leaves, the soft grass, the humming of crickets, and all the natural forest setting beauty that makes Carved the immersive experience that it is.

Pumpkin head scarecrows have their charms anywhere perhaps, but here, there is a sense of being a part of nature, the spectral spectacle of All Hallows Eve, the time of Samhain and ancient tradition.

While enjoying the gardens, you can partake of tasty eats such as churros, delightful black bean and acorn squash tacos, cocktails, hot chocolate, and spiked hot chocolate.

Timed tickets mean the trails and beautifully lit set pieces are relatively uncrowded and the magic of an All Hallows Eve experience will happily haunt you. Pricing ranges from $29–$52, for adults and $19–$37 for kids 12 and under. ) A new anytime ticket is also available for $85.

Enjoy the spooky fun.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis