See It Now: A Sensory Extravaganza in Escondido

 By Lonnie Burstein Hewitt

 

Please Stand By. The start of the show, photographed by
Scenic Designer Matthew Herman, who along with
Mike Billings (Lighting Design) and Blake McCarty (Projection Design)
turns the stage picture into a constantly changing
work of art. (Matthew Herman)

If you’re a lifelong theater enthusiast or simply a lover of extraordinary events that feature brilliant performances, stunning scenic, lighting, and costume design and imaginative soundscapes, you have until March 3 to catch The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at California Center for the Arts in Escondido.

This first-time-in-San-Diego production, presented by CCAE Theatricals, evokes all the dictionary definitions of Brilliant: very bright and radiant, striking, distinctive, extremely intelligent and impressive.

The play started out as a prizewinning 2003 novel by Mark Haddon, a British writer, about a 15-year-old boy the author once described as “a mathematician with some behavioral difficulties.” Haddon called his book “a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way.” It’s actually an odd kind of mystery story, that starts out with a murdered dog.

In 2012, playwright Simon Stephens and the National Theatre in London turned the novel into a multi-award-winning production, which then became a multi-award-winner on Broadway. There were touring companies, so my husband and I got to see the show in L.A. in 2017. It was minimalist, but unforgettable.

CCAE’s version of Curious Incident takes the emotionally moving, often weirdly funny play to a whole new level, visually and sonically. Not only is the stage picture a constantly changing artwork, it’s also a central character in the show, further enhanced by Jon Fredette's  sound design. This gives audiences a chance to feel what it’s like to be on what we now call the autism spectrum and makes it thrilling to identify with the main character, Christopher, who is truly special. 

Two more views of the show from the Scenic Designer below. (Matthew Herman)

Christopher’s dad, distraught, after discovering his son is gone.
Note the giant projection of Christopher in the background. (Matthew Herman)

Christopher at the train station. (Matthew Herman)

Daniel Patrick Russell, the actor who plays Christopher, is on the spectrum himself, and his performance is riveting. Born in Australia, he has been making his mark on international stages for over a decade and appearing in films and on TV as well. He’s the heart and soul of the gifted ensemble here, and no photo can capture the way he moves.

 Daniel Patrick Russell as Christopher, addressing the audience at the end of the show. (Maurice Hewitt)

Kudos to everyone connected with Curious Incident: producer, director, actors, designers, composer, choreographer and all the tech people behind the scenes. If you’re reading this now, the best thing to do is phone 800-988-4253.  
For showtimes and other details: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at Center Theater, California Center for the Arts in Escondido through March 3rd.

 And don’t miss The Art of Autism, a small exhibit of works by autistic artists on view in the lobby.

The Way It Was…It Was What It Is., mixed media piece by Clark Warren. (Maurice Hewitt)

Some of the paintings on display. (Maurice Hewitt)

 

Lonnie Burstein Hewitt is an award-winning author/lyricist/playwright who has been writing about arts and lifestyles in San Diego County for over a dozen years. You can reach her at hew2@sbcglobal.net

Octopi + AI @ Gallery QI

 By Lonnie Burstein Hewitt

 

Viewing Memo Akten’s Distributed Consciousness installation on opening night. (Lonnie B. Hewitt)

You may not see any connections between cephalopods and artificial intelligence but an installation by Memo Akten at UC San Diego’s Gallery QI aims to change the way you see and think about such things.

The multi-disciplinary artist, an assistant professor in UCSD’s Department of Visual Arts, is inviting us to move beyond the distinctions we make between humans and animals, living and non-living intelligence, and begin to embrace a more expansive, more rewarding conception of the interconnectedness of all things.

Akten’s current installation, Distributed Consciousness, had its beginnings in a small fishing village in Turkey in 2021, when Covid postponed his coming to San Diego by putting his U.S. visa on hold.

He spent a lot of time in the ocean, and often saw octopi when snorkeling, but a close encounter with a rock-sitting octopus that suddenly seemed to be flashing in brilliant colors made him start thinking about what that animal was thinking and what kind of mind it might have. Octopi share a fair portion of our DNA, he discovered, and they have brains in each of their eight arms--distributed consciousness. What they have may be a kind of consciousness we don’t really understand, but diving into these sorts of issues is what Akten calls hallucinating. Hallucinating, he says, is not something that means you’re crazy: it’s expanding your ways of envisioning new possibilities. And that, he adds, is what artists do: “Hallucinating is part of our job description!”

Close-up of an octopus from Distributed Consciousness. (Courtesy Gallery QI)

The talk he gave at the opening event on January 25 attracted a full house, and there were many questions from the audience. The questions, like the audience members, were mostly academic, but the concept behind Distributed Consciousness can be strongly appealing to everyone. He is encouraging optimism, imagination, collaboration, and community.

The installation features custom AI-generated artwork encoded with 256 verses of poetry created through GPT-3, a language model that can generate poems, stories and dialogue out of whatever is input into it. Akten, who has been working with AI for decades, spent thousands of hours interacting with GPT-3, refining his input, and creating images of octopi.

He’s not just doing hyper-bright octopus portraits; he’s trying to change how we look at, think about, and relate to our real and virtual worlds. 

More images from the installation. (Maurice Hewitt) 

You can experience Distributed Consciousness through March 24 at Gallery QI in Atkinson Hall at UCSD. Hours: Monday-Friday. 12-5 p.m.  Make yourself comfortable on the beanbag cushions, stay as long as you want, and see how you feel about real life, AI and yourself when you leave.

For more about Memo Akten and his work: www.memo.tv/

Lonnie Burstein Hewitt is an award-winning author/lyricist/playwright who has been writing about arts and lifestyles in San Diego County for over a dozen years. You can reach her at hew2@sbcglobal.net

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

 Words and Photos by Lonnie Burstein Hewitt

 

Waiting for a sign

Walking around the UCSD campus after a recent event on a clear and not-too-chilly evening, I was reminded of a song I used to like years ago.

Sign, sign
Everywhere a sign
Blockin' out the scenery
Breakin' my mind
Do this, don't do that
Can't you read the sign?
(from Sign, by Five Man Electrical Band, 1970)

So I started taking photos of some of the many signs I saw.

This sign, where I started my walk, looked pleasantly creepy.

What really caught my eye and kept me standing still to capture varied views of what I was seeing was Bruce Nauman’s Vices & Virtues, a towering neon display of the seven deadly sins and their contrasting virtues that has always been one of my favorite pieces in the Stuart Collection of outdoor sculptures. It’s now hard to see from most places on campus since the university’s penchant for putting up view-blocking buildings. (In my college days we called that an Edifice Complex.)

 

Back home, I discovered a short documentary in UCSD Library Digital Collections where the Nauman talked about wanting to do something that would make people think about those words in different ways. And it was hard to look them up, he said: “Everyone knows what they are until they try to write them down.” I think this image reveals some of those complications.

Mixed Messages

 

Most of the signs were warnings, in one way or another.

One amused and confused me: 

Lost & Found? Maybe not?

 

Some offered good advice: 

 

Some were kind of attractive.

… especially with the moon overhead. 

 And in the end, I found encouraging words. 

And finally, a happy ending to my walk, in the latest addition to the Stuart Collection: Kahnop -To Tell a Story, by artist Ann Hamilton.

 It’s a small part of an 800-foot-long stone path that actually contains a readable story. You can try to put the story together as you stroll through, or just pick out the words that say something to you.

Here’s hoping you find that happiness for yourself. 

Lonnie Burstein Hewitt is an award-winning author/lyricist/playwright who has been writing about arts and lifestyles in San Diego County for over a dozen years. You can reach her at hew2@sbcglobal.net

The Russell Lecture: Elliott Hundley - Too much?

 by Patricia Frischer

Elliott Hundley: details of pinned collage

An artist that makes a mini diorama and takes a photo of it and destroys the diorama before the photos were developed. An artist who created a huge collage, but decided the detritus he created making the work was more interesting than the art. Elliott Hundley constantly wants to exceed what he thinks is his limited mind. During his Russell Lecture at MCASD, you could tell he took the greatest pleasure in encouraging questions. He likes to be interrupted. He appeared almost bored with showing his work and purposely did not prepare a structured talk.

We did learn that he started with abstract painting. He knew there was meaning that no one saw, so he switched to narrative works.  And when painting became too laborious, he took pictures. He cast friends and family as the players.  He is an artist who does not think he has his own rich ideas so uses historic art, myths and theater which he then re-imagines. He is making copies as a way to understand those concepts which are many and varied. So, in the work, many views are revealed.  There is every path contained and every path is explored. 

The artist's mother in costume.

Gluing the photos at one point seems too hard of a decision. That is when pinning was started. He believes the pin was in control instead of him. Hundley then uses a back ground foam. This meant he could add objects and those became inclusive…magnifying glasses to draw attention to certain areas of these vast composition, strings of curtains. In some works, he is carving back into the foam. Eventually the works came off the wall entirely. The installations are more like performances.  There never seems to be enough as he fills every space.

A skeleton chandelier.

Hundley did save everything to begin with, dumpster diving, shopping, even the scrapes from cutting out images. Lately, his space is so filled, he no longer has to accumulate. In fact, as he has become known, people bring him truckloads of things to incorporate.

There are violent works, many of them about anxiety that he puts in separate categories; social, theological, bodily, information, environmental. Hundley is actually building his own world view, but in an uncontrolled way. It just unfolds and we see brilliance. He calls this sublime but reminds us “when a man brushes against the sublime, he is destroyed. “

Elliot Hundley started his talk by saying it was always “too much”. For me, sublime and anxious makes for fascinating. 

Installations sometimes include works directly on the wall
as Hundley believes this helps to under mind the other works.  

  

Russel Lecture at MCASD

 

Elliott Hundley in "Secrets" - Season 7 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

Elliott Hundley (b. 1975 Greensboro, North Carolina) received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence in 1997 and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2005. He has shown at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2006). The Broad, Los Angeles (2018–2019); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2016; 2017–2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015); Regen Projects (2021) to name a few. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019 and is in museum collections countywide.

Korean Artistry Inside & Outside SDMA

By Lonnie Burstein Hewitt. Photos by Maurice Hewitt.

 INSIDE: Sacred Mt. Baekdu by artist Lee Sookja

February 3 was, for a change, a sunny Saturday in San Diego and a great time to be in Balboa Park. We were there to see Korea in Color: A Legacy of Auspicious Images, a truly auspicious exhibition at San Diego Museum of Art which that day had an outdoor component: an array of Korean performers and artists in a special event titled On the Steps.

Outside : K-Pop Dancers from NK Dance Studio in LA

In the Study: Pictorial Ideographs. A panorama of slow-moving images that gradually change as you watch.

Three static views of one ideograph’s changes. (This and the 2 images below)

Women in traditional clothing welcomed visitors to artists’ tents adjoining the performance area.

Award-winning San Diego-based artist Saegil with some of her work

On the Steps was a one-time-only event, but Korea in Color will be at SDMA through March 3, and it’s something no art-lover would want to miss. https://www.sdmart.org
 
While we were there, we strolled over to the museum’s new partner, the Museum of Photographic Arts, which is now MOPA@SDMA. We always enjoy the annual Juried Youth Exhibition, which features students from SD and TJ in grades K-12. One of our favorites was the work of a 9-year-old photographer from Sequoia Elementary in Clairemont, but there’s lots more to admire, and the show runs through April 21.

Sea Level, by Ni'yema Alexander, age 9.

In the main gallery, we were thrilled to discover James Balog: Photographs from the Anthropocene, a display of imaginative images of humans and nature by someone whose name was new to us. You have until March 10 to see for yourself.   https://mopa.org
 

The Old Man and the Ape, by James Balog.

 A wall of relaxing nature photographs by James Balog.

 Here’s wishing you many eye-and-mind-opening encounters in the months to come!
 
 
Lonnie Burstein Hewitt is an award-winning author/lyricist/playwright who has been writing about arts and lifestyles in San Diego County for over a dozen years. You can reach her at hew2@sbcglobal.net