Review Rundown: The One With Stars, Art, and a Squid Game
Installation art is the theme in LA, while we check out Immersive Gamebox in Denver, and there’s probably one near you! (FIVE REVIEWS)


This week we have two themes: installation art and work that’s near you (maybe, probably).
The art theme includes a new standalone section that Arts Editor Laura Hess is calling Lucky (Art) Charms. These are installation pieces that can be woven together in as little as a day for when you’re just feeling like something different. Laura’s based in LA, but if you like this enough we might recruit the rest of the team to contribute.
Straddling both themes is Moment Factory’s Astra Lumina, which is installation art and is also part of a series that has pieces still running all over the globe. You might not be in LA or the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, but there are Luminas on multiple continents. The same is true of Immersive Gamebox, which Danielle played in Denver but can be found throughout the US, UK, and in Germany.
Okay globetrotters, lets get to it.
Looking for more? Last week’s Rundown “The One With Sci-Fi Cocktails, Space Stations & Superheroes” is up, up the sky!
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Astra Lumina — Moment Factory
Starting at $29; Rancho Palos Verdes, CA; through Jan 15
Sometimes you just need to shed your emotional skin and lose yourself for a bit in something beautiful.
Astra Lumina, the first of Moment Factory’s Lumina Night Walk series to come to the United States, has popped up in two spots. One in Gatlinburg, TN in the Smoky Mountains, and the other in a costal part of Los Angeles: the South Coast Botanic Garden in Palos Verdes. We went to the later, on a cold clear night when the moon was full and Mars peeked out from around Luna’s edge like a punctuation mark. Something that won’t happen again until I’m 101 years old. If I make it that long.
Nine installations are laid out on a pathway through the garden that tell a fable about the birth of stars. Some are large scale pieces of the kind you might encounter at Burning Man: sources of spectacle that mix dynamic light and sound into works that feel like they’re dispatches from another realty. Others are just pretty, and one feels like walking through the inside of a kaleidoscope by way of an enchanted laser forest.
The cumulative effect is the cultivation of awe and an infusion of joy, rooted in a sense that one has gained a kind of poetic understanding of the interiority of vast cosmic forces. A flight of fancy to be sure, but a welcome one. All this achieved thanks to the skill of Moment Factory’s designers and artists. Sure, you’ve probably seen all the technology involved deployed elsewhere, but it’s the how of it all that sets this apart from your other illuminated walks through gardens and zoos.
I came away from my time on Astra Lumina’s path feeling like someone had slapped a fresh coat of paint on my weathered soul, and wishing I had the means to travel around the globe and check out Moment Factory’s other Lumina’s. If there’s one near you, I’d encourage you to go.
— Noah Nelson, publisher and podcast host

Immersive Gamebox
$19.99 — $34.99; Denver, with multiple locations in U.S., U.K., and Germany; ongoing
Do you love escape rooms but can’t get your non-puzzling friends to join you? Do you like the concept of VR but get nauseous from the headset? Looking for a small group activity that accommodates a range of ages or skill sets? The solution to these problems (and more) lies inside the Immersive Gamebox!
Players wear visors on their heads with sensors that allow the game equipment to detect their location inside the gamebox. Players are not tethered to anything and they do not hold anything in their hands. Game visuals are projected onto the walls and players move about the room to participate in the games, which are available in 30 and 60 minute options.
My group played Squid Games which consisted of six games, each with a completely different mechanic or task at hand, all modeled after actual games from the show. We played Red Light, Green Light where a motion detector sensed our movement whenever the spinning head of Younghee was facing us. Next we had to walk around the room to cut different shapes out of cookies. One game tested our memory, while another assessed our rhythm — all while moving around the room, and occasionally tapping the walls like buttons. The games were highly engaging and kept us laughing (and cursing) the entire time.
There are currently 11 locations in the United States, five in the UK, and one in Germany. I had trouble reaching a human on the phone to discuss the games in advance of booking, but did eventually get some assistance via their Facebook account. Despite the lack of timely and localized customer service, my whole group had a blast and all agreed we’d play again with no hesitation.
— Danielle Look, Denver Correspondent
LUCKY (Art) CHARMS — From The LA Art Beat
A marshmallowy addition to this week’s Review Rundown is Lucky (Art) Charms: a delicious (and arguably nutritious) collection of installation art in Los Angeles. — Laura Hess, Arts Editor

Locating Perception — Sprüth Magers
Free; Los Angeles; Through January 14
An expansive multimedia artist, the late Nancy Holt has a collection of works on view at Sprüth Magers. Locating Perception consists of photography series and small and large-scale sculptures. Identifying herself as a “perceptionist,” Holt leveraged mediums to challenge ideas of the visible and invisible, and to explore tensions between the two. She described photography as a way for “vision to be fixed” and her photographic pieces contrast with her playful Locator sculptures.
The upstairs gallery houses Electrical System, a site-specific installation of a single, interconnected lighting fixture that looks like a chandelier merged with a jungle gym. In her work, Holt sought to create an “extension of looking.” Light and electricity are common utilities often taken for granted, but the sculpture fosters that extension of looking through the details: The gallery’s architecture is incorporated in subtle, odd, and humorous ways.
Across the street from Sprüth Magers is Urban Light, Chris Burden’s configuration of 202 antique street lamps. The outdoor, public work is a constant draw at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Long after the museum has closed, people gather and walk through the installation. Amidst the festive lighting of the holiday season, Urban Light and Electrical System remind us of the simple, incandescent joy of light.

LIFE CYCLES — JAPAN HOUSE
Free; Los Angeles; Through January 15
Furrowed in the tourist heart of Hollywood is a cultural gem. JAPAN HOUSE offers thoughtful Japanese-centric programming and art exhibitions. Last year, Kengo Kito’s installation of 2,021 intertwined hula hoops embodied connection and unity.
Currently, the work of a fourth-generation bamboo artist is represented in the gallery. LIFE CYCLES is an immersive, 70-foot, site-specific sculpture by Tanabe Chikuunsai IV. Although the sculpture is static, it feels active and kinetic; it moves in the playground of peripheral vision.
Chikuunsai’s mastery is evident in the sculpture’s negative space. Like a latticed fungi, the bamboo seems to be both seeping into and sprouting out of the walls. It’s gentle, airy, and somehow also looming. There’s an otherworldly, alien quality to it, and yet it feels elementary and organic. LIFE CYCLES is a gorgeous installation not to be missed.

Future Sensitive — Honor Fraser
Free; Los Angeles; Through February 17
Future Sensitive is the title of Lucy McRae’s show at Honor Fraser. And it feels like a future that’s not only here, but is somehow already outdated. Because it feels familiar — with its analog tech, DIY aesthetic, and mix of ordinary physical objects and materials — there’s a certain comfort and ease sharing space with sculptural machines such as Future Survival Kit (Compression Carpet), which is essentially a lo-fi hug generator. These installations are contrasted with McRae’s short films, which feature dystopian realities presented through movement and choreography, sometimes quiet, balletic, and even mundane; other times contorted and repulsive.
Described as a “science fiction artist, inventor, and body architect,” McRae’s relentless creativity is evident in this solo exhibition. The tunnels of isolation and bridges of connectivity of the past few years have distorted time. It’s become surrealistic. Her work echoes and amplifies this unsettling, visceral sensation. One of the films in particular, Delicate Spells of Mind, elicited that hazy, disappearing threshold between dream and memory. Was it real? Was this something that actually happened?
Go to Honor Fraser and try to grasp the intangible.
— Laura Hess, Arts Editor
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