Ultra!
July 17 - August 28, 2021
Saturday, July 17 at 12pm
Ultra! Kickoff & Museum Reopening Ceremony
Live Performances & Installations by: High Beams Project, Yozmit, Zac Monday, Mary Anna Pomonis, and Justin Stadel.
Saturday, August 21 at 3pm
Ultra! Extra
Live Performances by: Ibuki Kuramochi and Beck+Col with Tetiana Sklyarova and Kayla Aguila.
ULTRA! Performances curated by Jason Jenn
High Beams curated by High Beams Art Project
ULTRA! Public Art curated by Max Presneill, Hope Ezcurra, & Sue-Na Gay
High Beams #4: SPF 405
The pop-up exhibition took place in the Torrance Civic Center parking lot adjacent to the Torrance Art Museum from 12pm-3pm on Saturday, July 17. It featured works from 16 prominent artist collectives from around Los Angeles, Northern California, and Colorado. The first daytime High Beams event will include longtime participants, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Durden and Ray, and Last Ditch, as well as newcomers like MOTOR, SF Artists Alumni, Hyperlink, and La Backyard.
Although the projects will be as varied as the artists themselves, common themes revolve around social justice, life in a post-COVID world, and LA car culture. Many works were made in response to the traumas of 2020, like Durden and Ray’s poolside ode to the summer that never happened; Level Ground’s response to post-COVID anxiety; ARLA’s connection to domestic life during post-pandemic lockdown; and Technicolor Skies’ triumphal detritus arch dedicated to pandemic “victory”. Meanwhile, MOTOR, Hyperlink, and La Backyard configured their vehicles as mobile exhibition spaces, displaying works in and around a trailer, a station wagon, and a pickup truck.
Yozmit: Walk *Prince of Wands*
Yozmit created the Walk's concept and the original costume which was performed in this iteration by Peter Tomka, in which the Prince of Wands slowly walked around the outside and inside of museum during the opening creating a performative spectacle.
Walk is Yozmit's signature site-specific performance installation, a healing and meditative presentation of fashion. Walk has encroached into public spaces such as hotels, clubs, retail stores, and various streets around the world since its inception in 2000.
ZAC MONDAY: MOLT
Zac Monday created a site-specific participatory performance that took place on the TAM patio during the reopening ceremony. Visitors were invited to wear disposable eye masks and follow a path by touch guided by a crocheted monster (Zac Monday in costume).
Artist Statement: "Feeling a change can be a brutal process, and may take much longer than the act of change itself."
I like that in nature, the process of growth can be the ripping apart of old skin, or a perfect shell that is left to resemble an old form. While humans can shed their skin, we don’t really see evidence of transformation until a major physical growth occurs, ie: a child becoming an adult, a drastic hair dye job, death making us seem smaller in size. While traveling blindly, navigating the cord of time - I ask viewers to contemplate change within themselves. Feeling light brushes of soft comfort while moving through a maze unknowingly, the concept of space and time dissolves for a moment and the participants are able to be with themselves fully, scared or focused - to imagine how they have transformed after such an illuminating year.
MARY ANNA POMONIS & JUSTIN STADEL: THE EGREGORE OF TORRANCE
Artists Mary Anna Pomonis and Justin Stadel created a durational performance installation for TAM’s Reopening Ceremony directly across from the High Beams Project installation and outside the Nakano Theatre. In their piece Pomonis (in nurse’s garb) had visitors fill out questionnaire forms in which they could ask pertinent questions to the Egregore (Stadel in silver Hazmat suit busy vacuuming away feathers that represented the Sisyphean task of cleaning the air of virus particles in reference to the pandemic situation). The Egregore would then communicate the answer to the visitors’ questions via a series of signal flags, which Pomonis would then interpret with often humorous results.
An egregore is widely understood as an autonomous entity composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people. Reference to the concept of the egregore dates back to the ancient Hebrew Book of Enoch, and has Greek origins in animism as the égrégoros, meaning “wakeful” or “watcher.” In modern terms, egregores are embodied in everything from sports team fandoms and affiliation, to the will and direction of a governing body--a department of water and power or a marriage and family court system. Egregores can be transnational in scope, or hyperlocal. In the 1930s, as feelings of tension and war gripped Europe, artists formed local collectives that seized the moment as they understood it, attempting to manifest and interact with the egregores of their time. Futurists lauded modern wonders in technology and aviation and explored new contexts of thought with aeropaintings. Surrealists plumbed the depths of consciousness through automatism and subconscious dreamscapes.
