Los Angeles: Take a local art break

James Franco at Art Platform LA

This holiday season find time to explore art in your neighborhood, as local support is what keeps the visual and performing arts viable.   

        

Galleries: Although numerous art galleries have closed or moved in Silver Lake, Los Feliz and Echo Park—Thinkspace to Culver City for one—many of those that still dot the neighborhood follow a hybrid model of artspace plus commerce. Give them some love this holiday season and give yourself a visual treat.

Sancho in Echo Park at 1549 W. Sunset Blvd.

Two new storefront galleries opened this year. Weekend (at 4634 Hollywood Blvd.) is an artist run gallery. Look for Jay Erker’s multi-media collages at photographs at This is So Much Better, which opens Dec. 2. Sancho, at 1549 W. Sunset in Echo Park, showcases new artists inside and new bands outside at its small backyard performance space.

Celebrating 25 years, a visit to Wacko's La Luz de Jesus Galley in Los Feliz is a step into the wild and imaginative work of talented illustrators, comic book artists and animators and well-known artists such as Shag and Gary Baseman.  Selected by owner/curator Billy Shire, there’s always a twist to every exhibition.

           

Subliminal Projects in Echo Park had a thrilling year of exhibits from Art, Access & Decay: NY 1975-1985 revisiting the highly original 1980s downtown New York art scene to the current show of painter and collagist Billy Al Bengston’s latest work (through Dec. 11).

Alias Books in Atwater features a single artwork show

Bloom at M&A on Silver Lake Blvd.

 

Materials & Applications (M&A): Since 2002, a Silver Lake Boulevard courtyard has been home to an art lab of inspiring architectural and sculptural installations. Bloom is M&A’s current installation—a 20-foot tall metal flower with solar petals that open and close in response to the sun’s heat. 

Stop by and watch the sculpture bloom.

Social smarts: Spacecraft’s nightlife designs

Back patio at Mohawk Bend

If you've been out in Hollywood in the last couple of years, then you’ve probably been inside a building remade by Spacecraft.  Founded by Kristofer Keith, the design/build firm is responsible for Hollywood spots like The Bowery, Kitchen 24, Stout and Boho, which recently moved to the third floor of Hollywood & Highland.

Excerpted from the September Los Feliz Ledger:

In August, Keith’s latest and most ambitious project opened: the 10,000 square foot Mohawk Bend in Echo Park. Owned by Los Feliz’s Tony Yanow and his wife Amy, the already wildly popular gastro pub features a crowd-pleasing menu with savory vegan and vegetarian specialties, and a changing selection of artisan cocktails from California spirits, craft beer--72 kinds--and wine on tap.

I beams frame Mohawk Bends' interior

Mohawk Bend now occupies a 100-year old brick building that once was the Estudio Theater—longtime locals may recall how it sat empty and decaying for 26 years. To use the building and meet current building codes, Keith essentially built a building within the vast space.  The exposed steel I beams framing the interior are not only a design element but meet a structural requirement.

Vintage beer signs at Mohawk Bend

Although there are retro touches, Yanow’s personal collection of vintage beer signs for instance, Keith purposefully avoided a fake nostalgic look. “I didn’t want something too slick either,” he explains. “So I went for something down the middle, an industrial but stylized direction,” he notes.  Custom built seating is made from plywood (also exposed); upholstery has a mid-century orange hue. The floors are concrete and the kitchen is open to view from the long polished concrete bar cast on site.

Dividing the back third of the vast room from the main bar and dining area is a 20’ high mosaic glass wall. The patterned glass wall also defines Mohawk Bend’s interior patio, lit by skylights and a concrete fireplace. The room’s exposed brick walls help create an urban, citified vibe. As Keith explains, he wanted the space to recall restaurants he’s visited in New York and Toronto that have taken over and enclosed a back alley.

Naya will emerge from Tantra space

Among Keith’s other commissions is an ongoing transformation of Tantra restaurant, also on Sunset Boulevard.  To be renamed Naya,  Keith is reconfiguring the Indian restaurant, creating an all white dining room and an adjacent lounge in regal colors. There will also be a back patio for dining.  As with all his projects, he stays away from theme-y type designs or a signature personal style that doesn’t necessarily translate to every assignment.  “I like to create a sense of place,” he confirms.

Mohawk Bend

2141 W. Sunset Blvd.

213/483-2337

The Kids are All Right gets Los Angeles' bohemian side just right

Shot in-and-around Los Angeles, director Lisa Cholodenko captures Silver Lake and Echo Park's boho aesthetic in "The Kids Are All Right." (With spot-on, smart and funny performances from Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, too!)   It's a very well art-directed version of reality with looks that seem torn from the pages of architect Barbara Bestor's Bohemian Modern: Living in Silver Lake. Pictured above is the Echo Park vintage-tinged dining room of Mark Ruffalo's character. Kudos to production designer Julie Berghoff for making his hillside home so believably lived in.

Who wouldn't want to stop in at the locavore restaurant--supplied via a bountiful community garden-- that Ruffalo's character owns? (Exteriors shot in Echo Park). There's a lovely, artfully-lighted outdoor patio, rustic wood panels and a cozy lounge/bar.  Imagine Forage's menu meets Malo's bar vibe set in the outdoor garden at Cliff's Edge, complete with a Santa Barbara County-made wine list.

Perhaps there will be a "Sideways"-like bump in sales for the Santa Barbara wines featured in the film including Alma Rosa and Fiddlehead Cellars' Pinot Noir.  The movie will be in theaters this Friday. If only the fictional restaurant would open soon too.

Echo Park: Fallen Fruit cooks up a public fruit jam on Alvarado.

Expect a sticky mess this Sunday August 2 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. when art collective Fallen Fruit and Machine Project put on the fourth annual public fruit jam. Pictures above are from last year's event which was very popular (300 jam makers). My suggestions: arrive early and mix up basic fruits. I was a little too creative last year: no takers yet for my fig, kumquat and mixed fruit melange---the more sedate plum and strawberry jam was a keeper.

Echo Park: Brite Spot gets a cameo in "Food, Inc."

"Food, Inc." is the documentary du jour: an elegantly crafted investigation of U.S. government food policies and a hard look at agri-business giants. Most disturbing is footage shot in cattle slaughter houses, chicken farms  and the terrible killing floor for pigs.  Echo Park's Brite Spot has an early cameo: writer Eric Schlosser is interviewed at the counter and served up a very appetizing looking cheeseburger and fries.  Eat before the movie; that cheeseburger will lose its appeal but you'll learn the hard truth about America's food chain.

Media watch: Daily Show, Anthem Magazine & Audi

The Daily Show did their own mash up of Shepard Fairey's Obama poster on Monday night combining it with his Obey logo part of an amusing bit on Fox News and how Americans are now under tyrannical rule aka the Democrats are in the majority.  Next up an Audi commercial shot at John Marshall High school called "School's Out." Also amusing because the commercial makers came in and repainted the school's doors a nice dark brown and replanted the front lawn so now there is a lawn.  Kids in the school are a nice diverse lot and picture perfect as you'd expect but night-and-day away from Marshall's actual student body.  And Anthem Magazine's current issue features and interview and photo spread with Rashida Jones, of "The Office" now "Parks & Recreation," shot at Neutra's VDL house on Silver Lake Blvd.