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
Prepare to get in a Scramble just in time for the New Year. At the dA Center for the Arts in Pomona through January 2nd, artist Atilio Pernisco offers a mysterious and dreamy collection of works that are as layered and edgy as they are beautiful.
According to Pernisco, the exhibition is a culmination of ten years of work that represents his response to “the strange in the familiar while living in suburban LA. These were gestural, wet on wet, very painterly.” The works he created for Scramble began during the first period of the COVID-19 pandemic and he says used limited materials. His source was “a bank of personal images and digital references of a more universal relevance in order to paint.”
The chaotic beginning of pandemic times and the charged political climate were both incorporated into this body of work. Pernisco notes “I was trying to make sense of these absurd times by contemplating a narrative from a collage of images and reorganizing thoughts to paint.”
Many of these images come from cell phone photos that the artist took, using them as some painters draw. “I consider the cell phone photograph as a way of making a sketch. I need a couple of photographs to establish some kind of association, making a collage of images…Just as in dreams, where the images have symbolic power and keep coming back, the photographs on the floor in the studio are mixed and re-contextualized with each juxtaposition…I use the initial image as a pretext to experiment formally. The image is the origin, painting is the action of matter over representation.”
Impressively, he created more than 55 works, including paintings, drawings, and monotypes as he tried to make sense of the chaos and express the inchoate thoughts of this time period. He says he was “painting by reorganizing sort of pictorial sentences by adding and subtracting paint on canvas.”
The process worked elegantly, producing rewarding, thought-provoking works that are a landscape into the mind and soul as well as the physical world. The exhibition reflects the artist’s belief that “Painting is where materiality and immateriality mix—the mind and the body, the rational and the irrational.”
In many of the works, Pernisco makes marks on the canvasses, that could appear as if they were scratches from another dimension or an underworld. He says the process of mark-making is usually a response to the last mark for him. “Usually, I start with the drawing of the image I want to make, sometimes the canvas has some strikes of colors. Later I render areas and I erase faces, arms.”
The result is something that mixes real and surreal in an evocative, immersive flow. He describes the process as that between “Memory as the image, and experience of the moment now – paint stains. The painting surface fluxes between figurative and abstraction at times. [In this] way I’m trying to create poetic associations between colors and textures using intentionality and chance.” In other words, much like in life itself, his images coalesce and shift between the unexpected and the planned. The paintings also reflect a sense of immediacy and imminent possibilities to the viewer.
Pernisco wants viewers to bring their own interpretations and connections to his work, reacting in the most personal manner possible to the paintings. But the images also have a universal, even classical feel in terms of approach, even when deep in surrealism. They exhibit a true sense of place, even if that place does not seem entirely recognizable. Pernisco says the images “delve between two places: childhood memories of Buenos Aires, Argentina and adult life living in Los Angeles.” He adds that each work juxtaposes fiction and reality and blurs the thin line between them.
In his Pomona exhibition, Pernisco exhibits several different mediums. While his painting is what he says best expresses his work as an artist, at times he needed a break, drew some larger works using charcoals as well as creating monotypes with a small press. “These monotypes influenced the later paintings and began using a monochromatic palette, a painterly execution.”
Scramble appears to represent a vital interior landscape of the mind and soul. Pernisco explains “These [paintings] are poetic gestures, a possibility of a new language perhaps…[of] the mind, the memories, the stories told. All that is the perfect brew to experience a new sensation perhaps. I’m in search of the experiential aspect of painting, its poetic distortion of a stroke, of a certain speed, an omission of a torso.”
In each of his paintings there is always a tension between something that has just occurred, is currently happening, or about to take place. Some of that visual tension arises from the fact that whatever is leading to that event, or caused it, is kept hidden from the narrative of his art. There is a sense of imminent revelation, even anticipation, but that is for each individual viewer to determine for themselves.
Pernisco’s mix of narrative, his combined use of figurative painting and abstraction/elements of the surreal take viewers into a world as rich and strange as a dream but more rooted in the collective, material consciousness. The title of the exhibition serves as its description, referring in part to the diversity of the works, mediums, the figurative characters’ states of mind, and the artist explains, his own. “Scramble can mean to construct or deconstruct… my state of mind between fiction and reality…past and present and all the untold stories in between.”
The dA Center for the Arts is located at 252-D, S. Main Street in Pomona. To schedule a visit, go to www.dacenter.org. The closing event for Scramble will be January 2nd from 3-6 p.m.
Pernisco will also have work featured in an upcoming exhibition Momentous Occasions, an exhibition of six figurative painters, at Durden and Ray at the Bendix Building, with an opening reception on January 8th. Durden and Ray is located at 1206 Maple Ave., #832 Los Angeles, CA 90015
Durden and Ray together in collaboration with Level Ground have brought a brilliant mix of art, video, and poetry into being as a collision of light, color, sculpture, immersive experience and astonishing fun. The Blooming in the Whirlwind exhibition closes with an artist’s talk on December 5th.
It’s a riveting show at the Bendix building gallery, one that seems fraught with rich meaning and emotion. This whirlwind is a cavalcade of dreams, desire, and collaboration.
The conversation between collectives began with poems that inspired films, that led to visual art installations. Poets were paired with filmmakers, filmmakers with installation artists.
The title is fitting, referring to a classic poem by Gwendolyn Brooks written in 1968, another chaotic time here in the land of out of control hopes and dreams. But the exhibition itself took that chaos and made of it a thing of beauty and poignance, of fallen leaves and satin kitchens, of gilt edged tears and strangely alien sculptural “life forms.”
Curated by Level Ground’s Andy Motz, Rebekah Neel, Samantha Curley, and Simone Tetrault, poetry and filmmaker pairings included poets Christina Brown, Daniel Binkoski, DeiSelah, Jireh Deng, Karly Kuntz, Madeleine St. John, Noor Jamal, Simone Tetrault, and Tamisha A Tyler and filmmakers Andrés Vazquez, Anthony D. Frederick, Andrew Neel & Alex C. Smith, Ilgın G. Korugan, Labkhand Olfatmanesh, Leila Jarman, Meredith Adelaide, Rich Johnson, and Taree Vargas.
Curated by Durden and Ray‘s team of Arezoo Bharthania, Ismael de Anda III, and Sean Noyce were installation artists Bharthania, de Anda III, and Noyce, Dani Dodge, Kiyomi Fukui, Sean Noyce, Tina Linville, Reed Van Brunschot, Flora Kao, and Ricardo Harris-Fuentes. Artworks and many of the artists in the gallery with their work, shown below.
From Kao’s glorious autumnal forest to Fukui’s leaf-imprinted chair, de Anda III’s rocking, glowing drum kit, and Dodge’s tear-stained shower of TikTok images and gold leaf tear drops, to Bharthania’s photographic nightscape, Noyce’s towering layered sculpture, and lush tactile work by Van Brunschot, the harmony and kinetic connection between writers/filmmakers/and installation visual creators was vibrantly alive.
As with many exhibitions held at the D & R space, this collab effort was as fresh and compelling as it was entirely enjoyable. Collectives that make cutting edge cool and accessible? A resounding affirmative.
This exhibition was both response to the pandemic isolation and a glorious assault on the senses – power to the people arising from the pandemic and ponderous times.
Durden and Ray is located on the 8th floor of the Bendix Building in DTLA at 1206 Maple in the fashion district.
Ooh la la – photographic artist and author Carolyn Campbell’s bestselling book, City of Immortals: Père-Lachaise Cemetery, Paris came to life at the Raymond Kabbatz Theatre in Los Angeles November 6th.
An immersive multi-disciplinary festival, the 6-hour event paid tribute to the many artists resting in the cemetery from Bizet to Jim Morrison.
The event included a photographic exhibition, film screening, artist talks, and book signing, as well as tasty baguettes and champagne.
While Campbell’s large-scale prints of her beautiful photographs were the centerpiece of the exhibition, the ultimate interpretation of these works and the book itself came in the form of living performance artists interpreting the works of the composers, poets, dancers, and visual artist who now reside in the monumentally sculptural cemetery.
The day unfolded with a screening of the documentary Forever from Heddy Honigmann, a tour of the cemetery that was powerfully poignant and meditative, a beautiful overview of the cemetery’s environment and emotional impact.
Following the film, Campbell conducted her first presentation and q and a with audience members, showing slides of her images and describing her visits to Père Lachaise. After Campbell’s own book signing, it was time for a second talk, and the dramatic live performance.
A tour de force narrated by the character of Isadora Duncan, viewers were led into the world of the cemetery’s great residents, from Frédéric Chopin, Edith Piaf, Georges Bizet, and Jim Morrison, to a witty and riveting Can-Can dancer finale that drew people out of their seats.
Kacie Devaney wrote the original play, Stores from Pere Lachaise. Devaney also played Duncan, and choreographed the dancers in the production, which was directed by Pierre Leloup, the director of the Raymond Kabbaz Theatre.
Performances were top notch, with incredible voicing and sinuous, well-choreographed dances. The cast members, many of whom took on multiple roles, included: Cedric Berry, Victoria Kirsch, Shana Blake Hill, Nora Germain, Chloé Perrier, Cabaret Versatile, Félixe de Becker, and Kacie Devaney. Kirsch, a fine pianist, also served as music director. Berry’s brilliant baritone was a special standout.
It was a fitting tribute to and full-on entertainment about an other-worldly place, as depicted in Campbell’s City of Immortals. The non-fiction work, as gracefully written as it is photographed, features 100 color photos along with a fold-out map of Père-Lachaise Cemetery, which is sure to encourage a visit.
Copies of the book are sold through Village Well, an independent bookstore in Culver City – order there, or via Amazon.
Genie Davis; photos, Carolyn Campbell; Genie Davis
