Rise Industries

This past weekend Michele and I went to Art LA, one of them big art fairs that seem to be multiplying across the planet. This one took place at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, a handsome mid-century modern building near the ocean. Since Michele had a video in the Dangerous Curve booth, we got guest tickets through them (thanks Tim and Kathryn!).
So, the fair is like a big strip mall of art – mostly galleries from Los Angeles, but sprinkled with places from around the world. Some Mexico City, some Barcelona, someplace in Austria, another in France. They are all trying to sell some work, and we were in turn trying to find places we could feasibly show some work. So its alot of marketing type stuff going on basically. And there was actually a whole lot of good stuff here and there among the boring, bad or just plain detestable crap that serves as the filler any time a bunch of art is around.
The best part though, was that Machine Project – an experimental educational space which holds workshops, lectures, performances and shows art with a technical or mathematical slant to it – had taken over a large chunk of the lobby to do all kinds of fun stuff. They had some laptop sound performance going on, and some sewing workshop you could jump in on. Also a soldering workshop thing where you could circuit bend some little electronic sound things for a while. And they had a Nintendo Wii set up to play with just for the hell of it. No marketing tie in there, just a video game in the corner. But best of all the guerilla-jam-making group Fallen Fruit was in attendance cooking up marmalade from oranges gathered off of public and private land around Los Angeles. They are a gang of three guys who promote planting fruit trees around LA (and make maps of the locations with types of fruit) so that people can simply walk around the city and eat free fruit off of the tress or off the ground. Then they hold workshops where you bring in this public fruit, and they help you make jam. We have some of the marmalade cooling and congealing in the fridge, should be ready by the weekend. So, get out and plant some trees on public land folks! Just don’t get caught in the act.