Tyler Hubby

Bettina Hubby underneath her disco ball at the Rowena construction site

See also:
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week

When artist Bettina Hubby started bringing her camera down to the construction site at the foot of her street on Rowena, the team working there wasn't surprised, just cautious. At that point, the project, officially the L.A. Department of Water and Power's River Supply Conduit Improvement Project, had been underway for about a year on a stretch of street that butts up against Ivanhoe Elementary, right across from Camelot Preschool and the Edendale Grill. The project would restore a pipeline, built in the 1940s, that brings water to from the L.A. reservoir to neighborhoods in South Central. It hadn't even pushed past its deadline yet -- the project was supposed to last just over a year and has now lasted three -- but Silver Lakers were already unhappy, and some would come around with cameras to document the source of their unhappiness. Some others would give the finger to the on-the-job mechanics and engineers as they crawled past at work-zone speeds.

Just this past December, heated debates between concerned parents of Ivanhoe students and the LADWP about the dangers of particulate matter almost led to a shut-down of the project until summer, and the crew put in 14 hour days on weekends while they waited to see what would happen. Hubby understood her neighborhood's frustration -- "it's been a hardship for everyone involved," she says. But directing animosity toward the site itself and the contractors working at it didn't make sense.

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Carol Cheh

Artist Chadwick Gibson gives a virtual tour of his gallery, while inside his gallery

In the race to see which high-tech super-company is the creepiest and most Orwellian, Google has recently pulled far ahead of the rest of the pack. Its various tools, from Google Maps to Gmail to Google+, have become so powerful and indispensable that they are literally everywhere you look. The company's mission statement is quite simple -- "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" -- but it's also frighteningly comprehensive. Is there any area of our lives now that is free from Google's touch?

Artist Chadwick Gibson has found a unique way to deal with the quagmire of Google domination. In a solo show titled "Googlegeist: Mirrors Behind the Curtain," now on view at Smart Objects, a new art space in Echo Park that Gibson also founded, the artist presents a series of images extracted from Google Art Project. That app functions like a Google Street View for museums, letting users look at works of art and virtually wander down the halls of museums all over the world. The images presented in Gibson's show all have one thing in common: in them, one can see the Google photographer and/or his nine-eyed street view camera reflected in the museum's mirrors.

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The Institute for Art and Olfaction

Olfactory taste-makers at Scent Bar during last week's teaser event for The Institute for Art and Olfaction

I spent a solid 30 minutes last Friday night attempting to figure out what exactly was "old lady" smell, sniffing through several bottles trying to find a version of it, before I finally gave up -- but not without learning a thing or two about scents.

If that doesn't strike you as an evening of enchantment, you've probably never been to Scent Bar in West Hollywood, a boutique perfume retailer specializing in indie and hard-to-find scents. Sipping on some champagne, munching on a delicate selection of crackers, salami and cookies amidst a bouquet of festive sweaters, my olfactory senses were awakened to a world of perfume that exists outside of the typical "My dear God get me out of here" trek through the entrance of any given Macy's.

The modest gathering was a feast for the senses, and an excellent teaser for the up-and-coming Institute for Art and Olfaction. Founded earlier this year by native Angeleno Saskia Wilson-Brown, the organization is set to officially launch with its first project at Lincoln Center in New York in January, and is expected to open its doors in downtown Los Angeles at L.A. Mart in March. With Scent Bar co-founder Franco Wright and manager Steven Gontarski sitting on the Institute for Art and Olfaction's board of advisors, the cozy retail space served as a perfect host for IAO's impending brick-and-mortar location, and provided an essential introduction to the wide world of smells.

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Courtesy Jancar Gallery

Lena Nyman in a still from I Am Curious (Yellow)

This weekend, a dinner pays homage to Jonathan Swift, a virus dances to Beyonce and the politically minded star of a soft-core film crosses paths with a pair of kings.

5. Imaginary island dinner
In Jonathan Swift's satirical Gulliver's Travels, Lilliput is an island inhabited by tiny people involved in a dispute over eggs. Traditionally, all islanders had broken hardboiled eggs starting on the wider end. But the Emperor, who cut himself doing this as a child, decrees that all hardboiled eggs be broken on the smaller side, prompting some enraged Lilliputians to flee to the neighboring island. Concord Space will not serve eggs at when it hosts a Lilliputian holiday dinner this weekend, but it will serve various more colorful dishes -- pork chops, carrot sauces, candied pumpkin. There will be menu options for omnivores and herbivores.1010 N. San Fernando Road, Glassell Park. $15, RSVP required. (818) 649-0189, concordspace.com.

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Anna Jones

Artists showing signs along Mulholland Drive yesterday

See also:
*25 Alternative L.A. Art Spaces to Check Out Now
*10 L.A. Art Spaces That Change Our Idea of What an Art Space Is
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week

As I cruised along Mulholland Drive yesterday afternoon, I was transported into a new kind of artistic space. I continuously discovered an array of different interactive art exhibits and performances, unevenly distributed along the historic ridge-top pass usually traversed by movie stars in sports cars.

The site-specific installations occurred all along the 21 mile stretch of Mulholland, stretching from the Cahuenga Pass all the way to the point in the Santa Monica mountains where the iconic roadway becomes an impassable dirt road near the LA-96 Nike Test Missile Site.

For most viewers this artistic incursion into the normal reality of the city was entirely unexpected and even confusing... after all, what are all these people doing playing and watching music next to the road? What does that man have on his head -- and why does that particular star map stand seem to have so many customers?

Stephen Van Dyck, a performance artist, is the founder of Los Angeles Road Concerts, the name he's given to this event and three other similar ones, which have taken place since 2008 along similarly forgotten or unexamined stretches of San Fernando Boulevard in the Valley, Washington Boulevard, and Sunset Boulevard (the most recent one). The series, one of a number of L.A. projects that are rethinking how to view and experience art, seeks to investigate and reclaim the often ignored or overlooked public spaces that line our public roadways in L.A. Over 110 artists answered an open call to participate in the intensive one-day only affair, ranging from established to emerging names.

"There is a sense that anything can happen when you're out on the street, and I think that gives people permission to let themselves be open or even disagreeable with the status quo," Van Dyck said afterwards.

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Elana Mann

Audrey Chan performs Walk of Cunts (Study After Judy Chicago) on Sunset Blvd. as part of Los Angeles Road Concerts, which take place along an entire L.A. avenue

See also:
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*25 Alternative L.A. Art Spaces to Check Out Now

In May, L.A. Weekly told you about 25 alternative art spaces that are at the vanguard of Los Angeles' vibrant scene. These are galleries located in funky storefront spaces, artists' studios or even their houses -- homegrown operations that are a far cry from the pristine experiences of museums and established art galleries.

That was only one chapter of the endless adventure that is the alternative arts scene in this city. Here we present 10 alternatives to the alternatives -- exhibition venues that skip the typical "white box" format altogether in favor of odd, tangential spaces, where you'd never expect to see art: a traveling shoebox, a voicemail account, a Facebook identity, a gallery director's desk, someone's vanity closet and the entire lengths of L.A.'s iconic boulevards.

Unlike traditional spaces, which strive for a flat, uniform neutrality that allows the art to bloom, the spaces on this list are so specific in their dimensions that they inevitably shape the installation -- and sometimes even the nature -- of the art that is exhibited.

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Sylvie Rae Glassman

Ja Young Kim, all wrapped up.

"The next departure is 7:30 p.m.," announced a voice over the intercom at the Van Nuys FlyAway, the sleek, park-n-ride bus terminal where you can hop a ride to LAX.

That seemed to be the signal to move, and the young men and women standing sentinel-like by the circular information desk came to life. Everyone had a wheeled suitcase, and their gestures of greeting and expectant waiting looked normal enough. One woman tapped her foot. Another ran forward a few steps waving, her face lighting up with delight. But, oops, no, that wasn't her friend/lover/ride. The waiting resumed.

A white-haired woman without a suitcase hurried past the information desk into the restroom, not even noticing the unusually self-contained men and women. On the way out, however, she did a double-take at this slightly abnormal scene, probably clued in by the 75 spectators lining the walls, staring intently at these "travelers." A little bit of The Twilight Zone in the Valley.

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Carol Cheh

Interior view of A Notorious Possession, an art project by Olga Koumoundouros at an abandoned home

See also:
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week

Artist Olga Koumoundouros' takeover of the abandoned property at 3411 Holyoke Drive in Glassell Park began as an act of desperation. She and her partner, who live across the street, were having trouble paying their mortgage and were trying to think of ways to avoid defaulting on their house. Their neighborhood, an old working-class settlement known for gang activity, was riddled with foreclosures, and they didn't want their home to fall victim to the same fate. Koumoundouros considered squatting in the abandoned house and renting her own place out to tenants.

Once inside the other house, however, Koumoundouros found herself entering into a thought-provoking relationship with the space, the belongings that had been left behind, the history of the tenants who had lived there, and the hot-button socioeconomic issues that surround the current foreclosure crisis. By exploring the site and chatting with neighbors, she began piecing together details.

The house, a cheaply built structure from the 1980s, had been owned by Patty and Glenda, a lesbian couple who worked as civil servants. Patty died of brain cancer while living in the house, and some time after, Glenda packed up most of her belongings and moved to Kentucky to live with relatives. While the house was worth around $250,000, the owners had taken out a second mortgage on it for the same amount of money. Perhaps not wanting to deal with an essentially worthless property, Glenda simply left it as it was, with a few stray belongings scattered inside, not even bothering to notify a tenant who lived in a smaller house in the back of the property. Soon after returning to Kentucky, she had to have her leg amputated for unknown reasons.

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Micah Levin

Sheila Malone, Gwynn Shanks and Cecilie Madsen performing in Simply Knot at INSTALL: WeHo

As quickly as it appeared, it was gone again. On Sunday, the El Tovar parking lot in West Hollywood was transformed for twenty four hours into INSTALL: WeHo, a pop-up, interactive art festival highlighting emerging LGBTQ artists in Los Angeles. Conceived by openly gay performance artist Mark Cramer, this exhibition served as a forum for the stories, struggles, and spirit of the gay community at large via a diverse array of mediums.

"Artists are historians," Cramer explained during an a post-event interview. "We're at a critical point for the gay civil rights movement and highlighting the work of those who have and continue to experience it is invaluable. L.A. is one of the focal points of this movement. We walk on these streets everyday, contribute to society, are expected to maintain social norms and practices, yet we are denied fundamental human rights. Having an LGBTQ art show in L.A. allows us to take an emotional, political and personal snap shot of this struggle."

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Carol Cheh

NICK+JAMES experiment with some bold, operatic dance moves.

Perform Chinatown, a one-night festival of performance art, took over the Chinatown arts district on Saturday night. More than 40 artists occupied various nooks and crannies of Chung King Road and beyond with performances that were short or long, dour or humorous, heavy or light. While there were some excellent artists in the mix and several pieces that were worthy of extended consideration, the event as a whole failed to add up to a strong, cohesive presentation.

This is the fourth year that a performance art festival has been organized in Chinatown. The event began its life in 2009 as Perform! Now! and that iteration remains the strongest and most memorable. Organized by a small coalition of local artists and gallerists, that event featured, among other works, a now-legendary performance in which Dawn Kasper roared up in a pickup truck, blasted death metal and screamed about nihilism for five minutes, then roared back down the street again, hitting a parked car in the process. Kasper has since gone on to fame and glory via this year's Whitney Biennial. There also was a lovely recital of Yvonne Rainer's iconic Trio A dance by artist Simon Leung.

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