Posts Tagged ‘Echo Park’

It’s easy to get jealous in Los Angeles.  Most everyone came here from somewhere, even if it was here, to try and create art of some sort, to go behind the curtain of media-making in an attempt to toss in a pinch of their own individual ingredients.  The result is an endless stream of Facebook invitations, familiar postcards on coffee shop pin-boards, and a daunting sense that others’ ingredients—some friends, some enemies, some people who just got to town—are taking over the stew.

But if there’s anything I learned in college—a smaller, but similar stew—it’s that the work of my peers, in analysis or collaboration, is often the best teacher out there.  And it’s precisely because you are jealous, because you can view their creative process as a mirror of your own.  You can say, “Huh, this person is no genius, they’re practically an idiot, but they made this choice.  I never thought about doing that.  Maybe I too can make that choice, only better.”  It’s creative capitalism, but the only way it works is when you’re actively supporting one another.

This seems to be motto of the Los Angeles-based art collective, This Is What We Imagine (TIWWI, or Teewee), a group of young video, film, photography, and design makers—many of whom I went to school with—that are exhibiting their latest projects tonight, Saturday night, at the Echo Park Rec Center.  Beginning at 9:00 PM, the program, called “Show and Tell,” boasts the premiere of two recent collaborative efforts: “Weekend of Wonderment 6” and “Remember When.”  If you haven’t heard of the first five installments of the “Weekend of Wonderment” campaign, it’s comprised of about four or five projects, all made within the time-span of two days and with the help of anybody and everybody available.  “Remember When,” also the product of many (as opposed to few), is a new comic web-series about a group of friends who try to recreate the lost memories of their amnesia-begotten buddy.

TIWWI’s “Show and Tell” begins tonight, Saturday, 9:00 PM, at the Echo Park Rec Center, located at 1161 Logan Street in Echo Park. For more information, please visit www.tiwwi.com.

Angelenos love a good art walk. We hit the pavement for art walks all around town, including downtown, Silverlake, and the Miracle Mile.  And, we walk the art walk down La Cienega and in circles at Bergamot when galleries stay open late for their openings. Not only do we have a chance to get the latest scoop from our friends armed with Tecates, we have a higher chance to run into one of our favorite food trucks. We have a sneaking suspicion that since we keep running into them when we don’t follow their Twitter feeds, they’ve been reading ours…

Right before Valentine’s Day, we’re sure that you are bracing yourself for unexpected PDAs (Public Displays of Affection). Re-think this idea as a group of artists are launching another type of PDA (Public Displays of Art) in art walk form straight through Echo Park.

These PDAs are much more palatable for your art starved tastes. You’ll find: chain link fence galleries, driveway theaters, a hands on crafting station, performance art, intersection musical performances, outdoor movie screenings, sculptures, parking lot mini concerts, and other various creative and mind stimulating public displays of art.

If you tweet about it, food trucks will come.

The Echo Park Art Walk is this Saturday, February 6th, 12 – 6pm, 12–6pm. The Echo Park Art Walk begins at Blue Collar Pet Supplies (1533 Echo Park Ave.) and travels through to FIX coffee shop (2100 Echo Park Ave.) Click here for more info.

We’d be very surprised if this is true of any of our readers, but it seems that some Angelenos are less than familiar with the art scene in Atwater Village.

Okay, so we are admittedly less than familiar with how to even get to Atwater Village not to mention how we’d start exploring it’s art scene.  The problem is that, well, it’s far.  Then, we don’t know where to go once we’re there – what if we miss the best spot? After all that stress, we’ll surely be hungry and we’re at a loss for where to get a good snack in the neighborhood.  Alas, we tend to just stay in our close environs.

This weekend, November 7-8, however, none of us have a good excuse to skip out on the “spaghetti side” of town, so called because once you get over there, the streets are so windy and confusing, they’re akin to driving around a plate of spaghetti.  The 12th Annual Silver Lake Art Crawl is here again to present you with a whole bunch of things you’d likely not do otherwise: spend time scouring the more eastern side of our fair city, try freshly harvested fish tacos as a result of an art/food experiment, and, well, actually walking somewhere.  There’s also a big celebration at Barnsdall Art Park on Sunday at 1pm, which will feature music, art, dancing, and plenty of food trucks like Cool Haus, Let’s Be Frank, Dosa Truck, Tiago Coffee, and a host of others.

To give us a better idea of all that the Silver Lake Art Crawl has to offer, we recently sat down with the festival’s director Drew Baldwin.  Lucky for you, we taped the whole thing.  Check out our video and definitely head east this weekend – you won’t regret coming across some new local artists nor will you be able to forget the deliciousness that is Lamill Coffee or Café Stella.  Turns out, it’s worth braving the eastbound traffic from time to time.

The Silver Lake Art Crawl is this weekend, November 7-8 from 11am to 9pm both days.  For more information, please click here.