Pretty Damn Cool

Carl Berg threw together the Illumination show for his "The Prospectus" space at the Pacific Design Center in a few days, and he didn't have time to assemble the elaborately rickety funhouse environment he had in mind for this collection of large-scale backlit transparencies, but it turned out pretty awesome nevertheless. I finally got to see one of my Moldy Slides in the large format I'd envisioned for them - this is Luray Caverns 1: Washington Column (2012)

The front gallery is taken up by a remarkable small group of photos taken by former Hog Farm anesthesiologist Andy Romanoff, documenting Nicholas Ray at the Chateau Marmont in 1973, working on his experimental collaborative film We Can't Go Home Again. Coincidentally, Lee Lynch caught a screening of the newly restored version of this while in Marseilles last winter for the Murder of Hi Good premiere, and it's been making the rounds in LA since.

Speaking of revisionist westerns, there was a fairly interesting experiment in that genre in Paul Young's adjacent video gallery Young Projects. American Night by the Berlin-based Julian Rosefeldt had several excellent postmodern punchlines and some hypnotic pastoral passages, but it's no Hi Good. Of course it didn't help that two idiot art chicks sat through 3/4 of it nattering at full volume about their stupid career ambitions. Haven't they heard of texting?!

 Of more interest was the walk-through video installation 1967 by Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib, which contained multiple references to Expo 67, a topic close to my heart. I wonder how many other viewers caught the looped sample from the Bobby Gimby's insidious centennial children's chorus novelty single Canada. Or the metastasizing geometrics of Habitat 67 (seen lower left, above)? Then I saw this in the parking lot:

The Pacific Design Center 

8687 Melrose Avenue (at San Vicente Boulevard) 

W. Hollywood, CA 90069 

NOTE: Open Tues-Fri ONLY! 

Andy Romanoff: Nicholas Ray at the Chateau Marmont and Illumination (also includes Petra Schilder, Johannes Spalt, Mazin Sami and Paul Silkowski) through November 2, 2012 

1967 up through Nov 1 

American Night through Oct 27