By Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor
A Los Angeles arts community known as VisionLA Fest put on an arts festival that coincides with President Barack Obama’s attempts to pull together a climate action deal with more than 200 nations at the Paris Summit.
The VisionLA festival was designed to engage the international conversation on the issue through the imaginative responses of artists and storytellers.
designed to engage the international conversation on the issue through the imaginative responses of artists and storytellers.
Over the course of a year, VisionLA Fest collected submitted work and publicized it through their website http://visionlafest.org.
The work submitted to the festival ranges from theater and dance pieces to concerts, and from readings and films to street art and popup art. The presentations have been taking place all over Southern California, from Malibu to San Pedro.
Among the interesting shows is Heather Woodbury’s one-woman show, As the Globe Warms. One critic dubbed it Charles Dickens meets The Young and the Restless.
The serial dramedy connects the dots between climate crisis, America’s religious secular divide and the near extinction of many species, including the middle class.
As the Globe Warms centers on the fictional small town of Vane Springs, Nev., in the desert, between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The young handsome herpetologist (a zoologist who studies reptiles and amphibians such as frogs and salamanders), Reed Winston Ferris, arrives in Vane Springs to study and try to save the butterscotch frog from extinction. In the show, the butterscotch frog is a subspecies found only in Vane Springs.
After painstaking effort, Ferris manages to capture a male and female frog and mate and breed them. Ferris is a womanizer involved in a problematic longdistance relationship with his girlfriend Alyssa, an academic writing a book about the anarchist Emma Goldman.
In Vane Springs, he develops two unexpected friendships, one with 17year old Lorelei Ray, the home-schooled daughter of a Pentecostal pastor who manages the local outlet of a famous coffeehouse chain, and the other is Melody Johnson, a smart middleschool student who lives in a trailer next to a casino parking lot, with a recovering meth-addicted mother and baby sister.
In this family on the brink of dysfunction, Melody’s Grandma Melinda struggles to earn a subsistence wage at the local coffee outlet, while her intelligent but drifting aunt is a prostitute.
During the course of this story, the lives of Lorelei, Melody and Reed and their families become increasingly intertwined.
As the Globe Warms is not Woodbury’s first show of this kind. Known for her groundbreaking solo and ensemble works, Woodbury has made a name for herself with works like her 10 hour, 100 character solo play, What Ever: An American Odyssey, which toured extensively, from Chicago’s Steppenwolf to London’s Royal Festival Hall.
Woodbury’s ensemble play Tale of 2Cities: An American Joyride won a 2007 OBIE (Outstanding Achievement in OffBroadway Production) for performance. Other awards include the Spalding Gray Award, and the Kennedy and National Endowment for the Arts Awards for Playwriting.
Woodbury actually started this serial in 2010. The first two seasons are available on her website at www.heatherwoodbury.com. New episodes of the 12 episode podcast have been posted weekly since October on Twitter on #VisionLAFest. The last three episodes will be posted between Dec. 1 through 10.
Other performance shows include:
Dominique Moody’s Nomad
The Nomad narrates Moody’s personal sojourn, her family legacy and a cultural odyssey. Its story melds life and art together as a narrative and serves as a catalyst to conversations about cultural, social, ecological and economic challenges of our times. As an architectural form, its roots have an African-Haitian origin. The Nomad trailer will be installed in the California African American Museum at the designated outdoor location, where it will be available for touring by Moody. The Nomad will arrive in the morning of Dec. 1 and depart at the end of the day on Dec. 5.
The Nomad is built on a tandem wheeled trailer. Materials consist of wood, corrugated patinated metal, reclaimed wood, found objects, galvanized metal, polycarbonate panels, end grain plywood, natural cork. At 120 square feet the Nomad has a capacity for only six people at a time, but it has been toured by as many as 200 people at a single event. The Nomad is based in sustainability and how to find housing for all. Once on the road, it will promote human nature interaction.
Time:2 to 5 p.m. Friday and from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.Saturday
Cost: Free
Details:www.dominiquemoody.com
Venue:California African American Museum, 600 State Drive Exposition Park, Los Angeles
MorYork Gallery
Clare Graham creates recycled art. The MorYork Gallery features a stunning, playful and transporting display of dozens of selected works. Groupings of curious pieces often take the form of furniture and many of his sets contain hundreds of thousands of individual recycled items such as scrabble tiles and bottle caps.
Graham’s work shows how repurposing the everyday results in a vivid, imaginative reframing of the familiar, a skill to be celebrated by a world now struggling for balance and sustainability.
Time: 2 to 4 p.m.Dec. 5
Cost: Free
Details: (323) 663-3426; www.claregraham.com/CGWbaset.html
Venue: MorYork Gallery, 4959 York Blvd.,Los Angeles
Kismetdipity, Spring Arts Collective
Kismetdipity is the force that directs two or more people to the right place at the right time — a gift of accidental happiness.
The Springs Arts Collective Gallery celebrates three years of working together in Kismetdipity with Collective artists David Lovejoy, Robin McGeough, Liz Huston, Andrea Bogdan, Jena Priebe, Winston Secrest, Tifanee Taylor and Darrell Harvey.
Kismetdipity celebrates the accidental happy happenstance of a group of people meeting and forging a lasting bond. The show embodies the strength of its members and their respect for one another and the world around us. All of the artists are reusing objects or celebrating our planet in their works to celebrate VisionLA Fest and our solidarity to be a part of a positive change regarding the environmental issues and concerns in our world.
David Lovejoy and Jena Priebe both reuse mixed media objects and ephemera in their works. Winston Rylee and Tifanee Taylor are doing works on discarded pieces of wood. Andrea Bogdan is using pages from an old calendar book and painting on them. Darrell Harvey, an old children’s book collaged. Robin McGeough reuses fabric and sews on canvases. Liz Huston celebrates the magic and splendor of the world in her surreal renderings.
The Spring Arts Collective is upstairs from the Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles and is open the same hours as the bookstore:
Time: 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Fridays and Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sundays.
Cost: Free
Details: www.springarts.org
Venue: Spring Arts Collective, 453 S. Spring St., Los Angeles
Art Makes Change – VisionLA ’15 Fine Art Exhibit
VisionLA 2015 presents Art Makes Change, a group exhibition of 60 local artists whose work strive to bring awareness to the climate crisis through various fine art mediums. The show will feature more than 200 pieces of fine art, sculpture, photography and site specific installations that inspire, provoke, confront and bring to light the many issues plaguing our world.
All works are for sale. The show is co-curated by Dale Youngman and Lilli Muller, two longtime Los Angeles based curators. The exhibit – split into four themes of Earth, Water, Recycle and Awareness – illustrate how art can create and promote change by focusing on environmental topics including sustainability, reducing emissions, the California drought, ocean pollution, endangered species, activism, while also reminding us of the beauty of the planet we need to protect.
Time: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Dec. 10
Cost: Free
Details: www.bergamotstation.com
Venue: Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica
Water: An Essential Conversation
This event is an Art as Activism exhibition at Avenue 50 Studio in Los Angeles. Curated by art historian Susan M. King, it features select contemporary works and historical posters from the Collection of Center for the Study of Political Graphics. The exhibition includes artworks by more than 25 contemporary artists working in an array of media including posters, painting, prints, video, and photography.
The exhibition brings together contemporary art and past posters focused on water as a vital and limited resource. The artworks chosen are meant as a social lever around a range of water conservation issues.
“While some of the contemporary art explicitly raises questions about the role of individuals and institutions in managing the current water crisis, other works focus on personal observations and political concerns,” King notes. “The combination of past and present art underscores the enduring human need to manage water resources and the usefulness of art in conveying that message.”
A stakeholders conversation addressing short and long range solutions to the water crisis will take place from 2 to 4 p.m. Dec. 6.
Time: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.Tuesday through Thursday, and Saturday and Sunday
Cost: Free
Details: http://avenue50studio.org
Venue: Avenue 50 Studio, 131 North Avenue 50, Highland Park
For more listings visit: http://visionlafest.org