Screening room view of Nancy Baker Cahill’s SEEK at Cosm Los Angeles (Photo by Shana Nys Dambrot)
Welcome to 13ThingsLA’s 13th issue, may it bring us all double good luck—and maybe double the subscribers? Seriously though, we are so grateful for those who have supported us so far, but we can’t keep independent art writing alive in Los Angeles without you. Smash that button! Tell your friends! Okay back to the art. This week’s adventures highlight the return of the big summer group show format, the enduring allure of the landscape, and art’s ongoing quest to make sense of our place in the world—plus not one, but two zine-making workshops! Find yourself at Cosm Los Angeles, Webber Gallery, Advocartsy, the Broad, MAK Center, the Pop-Hop, Art Division, Sargent’s Daughters, SHRINE, Torrance Art Museum, Reflect Space, LACMA, and the UCLA Film & TV Archive/American Cinematheque.
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Screening room view of Nancy Baker Cahill’s SEEK at Cosm Los Angeles (Photo by Shana Nys Dambrot)
Review: Nancy Baker Cahill: SEEK, now playing at Cosm. One of the most consequential artists in the new media sphere, Cahill’s work leverages the outer edges of what is possible with emerging technologies. Her most headline-grabbing works have existed in the Augmented Reality and blockchain worlds, but now the people behind the Cosm venues (intimate Sphere-like dinner theaters screening next-level fantasy artist films and other immersive spectacles) have commissioned a work from her to electrify their bespoke, state of the art domes, so we get to find out what she can do with cinema. This 30-minute monumental masterpiece of video art more than two years in the making is a free-flowing wrap-around journey into the heart of the natural world—a mind-bending symphony of fire, ice, primordial geometry, forest and desert, sea and stars, fractal and somatic choreographies, gentle voicing by Autumn Breon, and a psychedelic soundscape to support it all. You will wish you could just live inside it all day. Tickets: $22; Showtimes through August 22 in Inglewood; cosm.com. —SND