beyond eden

On Friday night and Saturday morning and afternoon I had to participate in a simulation at Pepperdine. The simulation makes groups of students pretend to be Brand Managers for a pharmaceutical company over a ten year period (done in about 13 hours). After the sixth period we were all unexpectedly told to go home because our professor had never seen any group of students (and he has been running it for decades and helped develop the software) run their programs so well. Our company (and most of the groups) had steadily increased our brand awareness and stock price every period, at one point launching a brand extension to over 4% market share. Maybe the professor gives that same speech every year, but none of the past simulation students we’d talked to ever mentioned it, so it isn’t likely. The papers we have to write about the experience actually have instructions for writing out the later years of the simulation, which would be a strange thing to write if you always end it early.

Even though we got out early we were all tired as the simulation is stressful and tension filled (our professor had to come and break up a verbal battle in our group so loud he could hear it from his room). I squeaked down the 101 and was able to watch the last quarter of the Ohio State Wisconsin game (and anyone that watched that game knows the irony in that statement). Afterwards I met up with Sam and we studied for our Finance midterm (this coming Thursday). After about three hours of that we decided to go to Hollywood to check out the Beyond Eden Art Fair. The parking was at the Kaiser hospital adjacent, but no matter what we tried we couldn’t find our way out of the parking lot to the art fair; we kept getting redirected out to Sunset boulevard. Eventually we gave up and walked all the way around the block to the Art Park. Of course we then had to climb up all the steps as the gallery is at the top of the hill. The fair was another “Los Angeles Arts Community Event” to showcase the large artist community here. They gave each “cutting edge” gallery in town wall space in the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery located in Barnsdall Art Park (yes, mom, this is the area beside the Hollyhock House that we visited years ago).

A lot of the art was good. Some of it I/we were actually already familiar with since some of the galleries I/we frequent already (the soap factory, etc.).

Outside there was a DJ and lots of hipsters coalescing. There were stereotypes of all ages at the show, from high class art snobs, to militant mohawked lesbians to 40 year old all-black original goth sorrow-pusses. There was even an asian girl on stilts:

On the main drag there was a projector artist, screen printing and engraving examples and some art projects for kids. There was a whole section of live spray-paint artists. In the little alcoves along the wall of the Hollyhock House area there were individual artists doing live painting. There were a few in the little alcoves that were interesting. One in particular (in which the artist was absent at the moment) caught my eye because I thought I recognized the artist.

I thought for sure this was Julian Callos… But it turned out to be Jesse Hotchkiss. Tell me the painting in progress there doesn’t remind you of this piece by Callos:

Here are some of the best pieces from inside the gallery:

Edwin Ushiro had two large pieces. These were described as “mixed media” and I really wish they described which media. They looked like digital illustrations, but they were printed on some kind of thin parchment paper. The illustration is very close to the look of very dramatic Japanese illustration. I would love to watch a whole film that looked like this.

There were a bunch of small paintings by Moki. I forget where Moki is from, but he (she?) is from somewhere in Europe and these mossy rock paintings always make me think of Sigur Ros.

Brooks Salzwedel had some interesting pieces that consisted of pencil drawings (and possibly ink) done on layers of what must have been acrylic. The effect of the built up “atmosphere” was great. Click on the link below to see more examples that are even better than the one that was there (the one below).