Art Spaces Pop Up in the Industrial Mists

Crank it up

Opening Night @ pLAyLAnd

The warehouses along the concrete-lined Los Angeles River, along the railroad tracks of Northeast Los Angeles and along its boulevards were once a manifestation of a city turning its back on beauty. Increasingly, however, those cavernous spaces are proving to be ideal arts venues.
At “VOLUME,” contained within AT1 Projects alongside the tracks in Atwater Village, 40 artists have the use of 12,500 square feet plus an adjacent “pavilion,” making it an option to hang a ten-foot tall sculpture from the ceiling, or a 12-foot portrait on the wall or to use a whole darkened room to install a video or sound installation.
VOLUME is a coming together of some 40 Los Angeles and New York artists working in such diverse genres as painting, sculpture, site-specific and multi-media installation, performance, sound art and video. Curator Andrea Neustein actually refers to the space as her co-curator. She also writes in her curator’s statement about how the space is informed by its Atwater Village neighborhood, “a cross-section of residence and industrial production.”
VOLUME, AT1 Projects, 3229 Casitas Avenue, Atwater Village, Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6, through June 6 (with possible extension). www.at1projects.com.
PLAyLAnd just completed a two-month stay in a warehouse on Eagle Rock Boulevard in Glassell Park, where it felt like a secret world hidden behind an unmarked back gate. Inside, its series of rooms and its weekend events featured 25 artists from Los Angeles, Reno and San Francisco and work as diverse as site-specific installations, circuit-bending sound scape, an international mail art show, video installation, live performing sculpture, photography, painting, large-scale sculpture, poetry bomb, spoken word, performance, handmade toys and Mudpeople. It was a “do-it-yourself inter-media art exhibition,” but it clearly wouldn’t have happened without Elaine Parks aided by Helen van der Neer, resident artists of the general area.
While VOLUME and pLAyLAnd exhibits included an awareness of their buildings’ previous incarnations, both exhibits were themselves ephemeral. Then they became part of the collective history of their spaces.
Kara Tanaka and Marco Rios, "Everything Was Closed," vinyl banner, at VOLUME

Mudperson at pLAyLAnd

Dan Carlson, "Threshold," steel + aluminum + monofilament plasma + cut sheet steel, at VOLUME

Neal Taylor, "From Here to There," sight specific installation featuring objects found in the warehouse now known as pLAyLAnd

Jess Ryan,”Kaleiding” at VOLUME (steel, MDF, wood, lacquer, mirrored plexi, hardware, projection screen, projector, original 2:32 film with score by John Atkinson of Aa)

pLAyLAnd's "International Mail Art Show"

Anna Homler, “Pharmacia Poetica” (detail) at pLAyLAnd
“The purpose of the Pharmacia Poetica is to demonstrate how the literal becomes the lyrical and in so doing, cures.”

Anna Homler, “Pharmacia Poetica” (detail) at pLAyLAnd

Anna Homler alien vocals, playing small machines and found objects, at pLAyLAnd

Opening night at pLAyLAnd with the art of Mike Christy

A.B.J.B. (Andy Ben and Jeff Boynton) explore "circuit bending"--the art of opening up electronic sound generating devices and intentionally short-circuiting points on their circuit boards in search of interesting and perhaps never-before-heard sounds. (pLAyLAnd)

Kenzi Shiokava, “Shaman Staff” (wood, bone and fiber) and “Corporate Ghost” (wood and telephone wire) at pLAyLAnd