Star Artist Comes to Bayside

By Ann K. Williams
Staff Writer

April 17 -- Stars – expanding and contracting, reflected in an astronaut’s visor, echoed in flecks of windblown red pigment – appear again and again in the work of Santa Monica artist Lita Albuquerque, whose banners will grace the Third Street Promenade this summer.

“I’m really into bringing awareness of the stars onto planet earth,” the world-renowned artist explained.

Albuquerque has an Egyptian air, perhaps acquired during her childhood in Tunisia, perhaps from her studies of hieroglyphs and the Pyramids at Giza, where her star projection covering acres of sand around the ancient tombs won first prize at the 1996 Cairo Biennial.

Albuquerque said she wants her viewers to experience “a different kind of time, galactic time, not a human kind of time,” as they lose – and find – themselves in her large-scale installations.

Bayside officials are thrilled that Albuquerque will design the Promenade art banners, the first new set since 1989.

“We’re really privileged to have her,” said Kathleen Rawson, executive director of the Bayside District Corporation. “She’s one of the most incredible Santa Monica artists.”

Rawson said Albuquerque’s art will “translate beautifully” to the Promenade, and she’s also satisfied that the celebrated artist has the experienced staff to manufacture banners that will hold up in a beachside environment.

For her part, Albuquerque is pleased to have been chosen to do the work. “It’s really exciting because it’s where my family roams around,” she said. “It really bridges the gap between art and life.”

Albuquerque – who like a master chef keeps the ingredients of her latest project secret – envisions the Promenade art banners as “a visual poem” that will have to be viewed from both sides, by walking first one way and then the other, to be completely taken in.

There’s a point to her art, though nothing as predetermined or didactic as viewers might be used to. It might be more apt to say there are points to her art, points whose meaning keeps shifting.

As viewers entered her installation at Pepperdine University this past Winter – called AOR from a hieroglyph meaning “magical light” or “electricity” – they read “AOR reflects the interchangeability of particles in the universe...no beginning or end, nor are any conclusions implied.

“This whole exhibit is about transmutation,” Albuquerque said.

The installation includes a two-dimensional star map painted on one wall reflected by a three-dimensional field of colored, lighted stones on the floor and videos of an astronaut and of two beekeepers who dissolve and contract in star-like galaxies of light.

Albuquerque pointed out some of the various devices she used to take her viewers on a meditative journey.

The disorienting Star Map and Rock Field does away with the horizon and lifts the viewer into a space where up and down, earth and space, are confused. Is the viewer looking up at the sky from earth, or through a spaceship window? Are the rocks rooted on the earth, or are they a representation of the sky?

The stars on the wall are those of the Southern Hemisphere, deliberately chosen because they are unfamiliar. Albuquerque has chosen primary red and blue, and white and gold leaf pigments because of their universal, culture-free character.

Left without mooring, the viewer is compelled to ask where, and who, are we in relation to the universe?

“In the art world today, it’s all about culture,” Albuquerque explained. She deliberately eliminates cultural references in her work, forcing her viewers to transcend the parochial.

The beekeepers who explode into light quanta and then reconfigure in the videos she made with Jon Beasley and Chandler McWilliams are not just a metaphor, Albuquerque said.

“Physicists are telling us this is what’s happening with us all the time... We each contain a particle from every human being.”

Art aficionados who want to experience Albuquerque’s work can visit Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles, where her star maps grace the courtyard. Or they can wait until June, when the Patricia Faure Gallery in Bergamot Station will show her work.

Meantime, in addition to the art banners on the Third Street Promenade, Albuquerque is starting an ambitious project funded by the National Science Foundation to create an installation at the South Pole that, when complete, will construct a line from pole to pole, an axis line for the earth.