L/A/O/C ON A WIRE:
Sex, Celebrity and Dirty Bombs

multi-media installation by
PATRICK KENNELLY

Closing:
Saturday, October 4, 2008

A Phantasmagoric Excavation of the Blasted
Terrain of American Pop-Cultural Myth

Comprised of painting, drawing, photography, video, and sound, L/A/O/C criss-crosses the social, political, and moral Highway overpass of religious fervor as embodied in the SoCal soul: wealth, possession, the cult of celebrity, etc. Within the sprawl of this wreckage, a dark mirror is revealed of the way the grandiose schematics of mythic American fundamentalism that ultimately comes crashing down to its inhabitants’ nakedly public reckoning with the betrayal and revenge of their own personal souls.

With a few subtly uncompromising strokes, Kennelly’s work leaps from coherency to confusion, painful suppression to exultant relief. The work is first and foremost about creating a viscerally immediate emotional experience in the viewer. Though imagined through great conceptual rigor, the final product ends up being frequently improvisatory, intuitive---even happenstance. Kennelly is particularly interested to the nightmarish aspects of pop-culture laden everyday life. He pulls his stories and ideas from personal feeling and experience that is mirrored through the clashing fictions and realities we encounter everyday across the broad media spectrum. In his installation work, he often gravitates towards narratives that depict the journey of bisected souls trapped within schemas far grander than their most garish fantasies and nightmares could ever realize - gripping with oblivious fervor the narcissistic tools of their own destruction.

Patrick Kennelly’s direction, design, performance, and curation in the realms of theater, performance, film, installation, and visual art has been presented in Los Angeles at such venues as Highways, MOCA, Track 16, and CrazySpace. He is a graduate of California Institute of Arts and is currently an MFA candidate in Theater Direction at UCLA, where he has directed the work of Amiri Baraka, Samuel Beckett, Maria Irene Fornes, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Charles Mee, Sam Shepard, and Stanislaw Witkiewicz. This past October at Highways he co-curated and directed a large-scale performance installation as part of Suzan Lori-Parks “365 Plays/365 Days” project. This past March, he directed/choreographed a trailblazing new production of Sarah Kane’s controversial and rarely performed play, “Cleansed” at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, designed by Tony Award winner Neil Peter Jampolis. Upcoming projects include a new production of John Whiting’s “The Devils” (UCLA's Freud Playhouse, Spring '09).

myspace.com/patrickkennelly

DANIEL ALONZO
TIERRA DE MI GENTE

as part of
Highways' 4th Annual Latino New Works Festival

Opening:
Saturday, October 11, 2008
7:00 - 8:30 pm

Visual artist Alonzo’s work captures the natural beauty and feelings of his native Santa Monica. 

Daniel Alonzo is a second generation Santa Monica native whose works depict the landscapes and seascapes of this place he calls home. He is the son of a Mexican immigrant and a descendent of the “Casillas Family” an old Santa Monica family that originally settled in the city at about the turn of the last century. This large extended Pioneer Family settled at what was known as “El Barrio”, on 20th and Olympic Blvd. Daniel was raised in the Sunset Park area, yet his first home was on 19th and Olympic Blvd. He attended St. Anne’s School, Will Rogers Elementary and John Adams Junior High School and graduated from Santa Monica High School in 1975. Daniel entered and won a statewide competition to design the Official California American Revolution Bicentennial Medallion in his senior year of high school. In the spring of 1982 he began his most recognized work, “Whale of a Mural” located on Fourth Street and Ocean Park Boulevard. Daniel personally funded this mural that took fifteen months to complete. In 1994, he began the series of painting that now make up the subject matter of his most recent body of works entitled “Santa Monica Landscapes and Neighboring Areas.”