LUMINEX, the site-specific, outdoor digital art exhibition, announced today its third edition in downtown Los Angeles on October 5, 2024, from 7 PM to 11:30 PM. World-renowned multimedia artists will transform a five-block radius in the South Park District of downtown Los Angeles for one night only, free and open to all. This year’s event will also include a curated pedicab experience.
An opening event will be held at 11th and Margo St, the site of Refik Anadol’s piece, from 7 PM. It will be followed by a processional led by artist JOJO ABOT. Pedicabs will travel the exhibition route and will be available to book before the event. Please see the website for booking details. Complimentary rides are offered for differently-abled persons.
This year’s LUMINEX is under the curatorial vision of Carmen Zella, Founder and Chief Curator of NXT Art Foundation and NOW Art. The exhibition features sound art installations, performances, and multichannel works. Artists include JOJO ABOT, Refik Anadol, Alice Bucknell, Nao Bustamante, Petra Cortright, Marc Horowitz, Carole Kim, Alan Nakagawa, Sarah Rara and LAVA (Los Angeles Video Artists).
On October 5, as the sun goes down, Los Angeles’ distinct downtown architecture will transform into an outdoor canvas, creating a walkable multimedia installation, video, sound, and performance installation. This will provide a platform for artists to tell their stories and reach a diverse public audience. The community at large will experience the arts in an approachable way while appreciating the urban landscape of Los Angeles. LUMINEX 2024 artworks explore chaos and order, the environment, identity, and more.
Sarah Rara’s multi-disciplinary practice— including video, sound, performance, and writing— explores the position of witness within fragile systems. Their work in video and sound considers gender, technology, disability, and illness in connection with environmental research. ORCHIS KISS (2024) is a video and sound work that examines orchid flowers and their relationship to gender, queerness, politics, and desire. Wildly diverse, gender-bending, and found in nearly every habitat on Earth, ORCHIS KISS looks at the natural and cultural histories of the orchid as queer-coded while also wielding it as a symbol of military and economic power.
Marc Horowitz‘s site-specific performance, Extremely Limited, takes place in a 10’x10′ room in a parking lot, featuring a large fan on one side and a serving window on the other. Horowitz must complete and package a small sculpture within three minutes and then serve it through a window. If he fails, a large fan creates chaos until the artwork is delivered. Inspired by Byung-Chul Han’s critique of burnout culture, this two-hour performance explores time and productivity pressures, using humor and improvisation to challenge conventional notions of art and audience engagement.
Alice Bucknell’s The Alluvials 2024 is a video game and film project exploring the politics of drought and water scarcity in Los Angeles through historical research and speculative fiction. It features nonhuman playable characters and blends cinematic modding, custom diffusion models, and drone mapping. The 2024 game includes four levels, each reimagining a gaming genre with an ecological lens. This entirely new, bespoke immersive audiovisual experience of The Alluvials will be made specifically for LUMINEX and will focus on the nonhuman characters that populate the game engine worlds of the project, produced in Unreal Engine and supported by Epic MegaGrants. It will feature a brand new score by the electronic musician Ken Yama and new graphic design elements by the designer Tom Joyes.
Petra Cortright presents an environment that encourages reflection and relaxation. Inspired by the enchanting description of the Sea of Flowers in the book of Narnia, Cortright creates a surrealist landscape that resonates deeply with themes of serenity and escapism. By appealing to urban audiences, Cortright encourages viewers to immerse themselves in the work where the boundaries between reality and imagination blur. The emphasis on beauty, optimism, and possibility in this piece provides a refreshing contrast to urban life.
Cortright’s work is deeply rooted in the history of painting, reflecting a continuity with artists like Caspar David Friedrich and Claude Monet, who explored nature and human fragility. Her landscapes recall the delicate and transient beauty of Monet’s works and the sublime power found in Friedrich’s. This Romantic sensibility permeates Cortright’s filmed scenes, blending traditional influences with her unique contemporary vision.
Nao Bustamante will reprise her work Brown Disco, inviting the spectator to defamiliarize the optical trick by which a disco ball disperses light into fantasy. At once light source and spaceship, this exuberant installation interposes itself into the art historical debate over minimalism’s “theatricality.” Bustamante has long been one of the theorists and practitioners of brownness, seen here as the uncanny and sometimes awkward alchemy that happens when bodies collide. Brown Disco is a soft memorial, emphasizing the care and comfort we find in the club.
Carole Kim‘s Chronicles of Touch: HOWDOESYOURMEMORYWORK is a textural/textual exploration of questions surrounding our relationship to memory, looping, tracing, and slippage. Joining Kim for this multimedia durational performance will be a stellar ensemble of dance, music, and live visual performers poised to jump into the soup of co-creation and discovery in the moment.
JOJO ABOT‘s Re.Member is a performance, sound/musical score, and projected video installation, a spiritual call to gather oneself and reclaim our worth by reconnecting with our true essence. It encourages integrating fragmented parts of ourselves and rediscovering lost aspects, releasing outdated beliefs for a deeper, authentic truth that nourishes life. Embedded in our DNA and cellular memory is a profound reservoir of generational wisdom, providing resources for wholeness and interconnectedness. By “re.membering”, we dissolve illusions of separation and uncover inherent love, recognizing the unity of all existence. JOJO ABOT’s work explores the abilities of new and ancient technologies for universal healing. In her artmaking and rituals, the artist draws from her heritage as an Ewe woman from West Africa and her nomadic lived experiences across the globe.
Refik Anadol‘s Artificial Realities: California Landscapes is an AI Data Sculpture that explores humans’ relationship to nature and has been represented in countless ways throughout art history, from realist landscape paintings to expressionist depictions of earthly colors. In this new work, Anadol uses a thinking brush and paints with data to show how human-machine collaborations can help us experience nature in a new light. For this the studio worked with a raw dataset of 153 million publicly available landscape images of California’s National Parks. Refik Anadol Studio is thrilled to give back to the city that embraced their art practice. Anadol’s pursuit to express a new concept of AI-based art by creating digital pigments initiated his journey from Istanbul to Los Angeles and, in turn, created the grounds for this artwork. This series of dynamic, immersive landscapes offers an insight into Anadol’s decade-long AI-based art practice in LA through a California-focused thematic lens.
Alan Nakagawa’s Conical Sound: Simon Rodia/ Antoni Gaudi is an audio installation incorporating acoustics recorded from within the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain, and Watts Towers in Los Angeles. This work is an audio mash-up representing the two unique and world-renowned buildings creating a third space of invisible architecture. Six large industrial lounge recliners, bathed in pink and yellow lights, surround an existing palm tree in the South Park Commons. Participants feel the vibratory sound as sounds play, resonating throughout the recliners.
LAVA (Los Angeles Video Artists) will curate its groundbreaking artist collective at the AVEN showroom and host a BYOB (Bring.Your.Own.Beamer) at Morrison Alleyway. VIDEO FLING will showcase cutting-edge creative technology artists and artworks. The mini-exhibition features innovative audio and visual installations that captivate and inspire, exploring the dynamic interplay between sound and visuals. A key highlight is the panoramic window projections, transforming AVEN into a living canvas of light and color, inviting visitors to engage with art in a new and interactive way. LAVA will also curate an immersive outdoor video projection art show inspired by BYOB events. Rogue projection mappers, guerilla projectionists, and avant-garde artists will transform the Morrison Hotel alleyway into a dynamic canvas.
With a mission to unify and make art accessible, LUMINEX is always free and open to the public. The award-winning organization has drawn an audience of more than 40,000 in-person attendees to its previous iterations and hundreds of thousands of online impressions. It has received critical acclaim and worldwide attention. This year’s exhibition is organized and managed by the Los Angeles public art organization NXT Art Foundation, the non-profit arm of NOW Art.
“We transform the city blocks as the exhibition site and its buildings as the canvas. In this unique platform, artists are able to share their work with our diverse public audience directly, and this opportunity allows for an exchange to happen with all sectors of society unlike any other. In our amazing City of Los Angeles, we boast both the infrastructure and talent to create such an experience. It’s a curator’s dream, and the magic that unfolds is unparalleled to anything I’ve ever been a part of or witnessed.” –Carmen Zella, Founder & Chief Curator.
“Communities around the world are reconnecting with public space in exciting and innovative ways and city governments, hospitality industry leaders, and local businesses are recognizing the importance of activating the public realm through art, music, and expressions of culture. The economic and social vibrancy of a neighborhood like South Park is enriched through events like LUMINEX, and we’re excited to continue our partnership with NXT Art for the exhibition in 2024.” –Nolan Marshall, Executive Director of the South Park Entertainment District.
EVENT SCHEDULE:
Check the LUMINEX site for a map as well as audio accompaniments to each piece
Artwork locations/addresses/times
- Refik Anadol Artificial Realities: California Landscapes – 208 W 11th St, Los Angeles, CA 90015
- Carole Kim, Chronicles of Touch: HOWDOESYOURMEMORYWORK – 1155 S Olive St, Los Angeles, CA 90015
- Marc Horowitz, Extremely Limited – 520 W Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90015
- Petra Cortright – 1225 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90015
- Alice Bucknell, The Alluvials – 1225 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90015
- Nao Bustamante Brown Disco – 1224 S Hope St, Los Angeles, CA 90015
- JOJO ABOT, Re.Member – 420 W 11th St, Los Angeles, CA 90015
- Sarah Rara, ORCHIS KISS – 1066 S Hope St, Los Angeles, CA 90015
- Alan Nakagawa, Conical Sound: Simon Rodia/ Antoni Gaudi – South Park Commons, 1114 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA
For more information, please visit: https://www.luminexla.com
@nowart_la #LuminexLA
About LUMINEX
LUMINEX is an annual, walkable, site-specific video art experience utilizing architecturally distinct walls in the South Park District of downtown Los Angeles.
Curated by Carmen Zella, Founder & Chief Curator of NXT/NOW Art, LUMINEX showcases internationally acclaimed and emerging Los Angeles-based artists, providing a platform for these artists to tell their stories and reach a diverse public audience. With more than 40,000 attendees combined in 2021(1st Luminex) and 2022, plus hundreds of thousands of online impressions, this exhibition continues to be an astonishing success — gathering national and international recognition, press coverage, and case study inclusion.
Among its distinguished awards, LUMINEX has been recognized by the local community as TimeOut LA’s Best of 2021, a TEDx Talk on ‘The healing power of public art,’ and more.
LUMINEX presents boundary-pushing works for marginalized communities who often face economic disparities, limited access to technology, and a lack of resources to create or experience video art and experiential installations at this scale. The high cost of equipment, production, and exhibition spaces can create barriers for participation, as well as historically unequal representation, geographical limitations, and lack of educational opportunities. LUMINEX recognizes the importance of addressing these barriers and is working to improve inclusivity, diversity, and accessibility in order to ensure that video art and experiential art can be enjoyed and experienced by all people and communities.
Since its inception, LUMINEX has been made possible through a unique public-private partnership. This arts-forward collective, including Show Imaging, Panasonic Connect, Arup, South Park BID, and NOW Art, LLC, among many others, have donated their time, expertise, and resources to make world-class public art accessible to all. Previous years have featured all-star line-ups including Refik Anadol, Sarah Rara, Carole Kim, Nancy Baker Cahill, Luciana Abait, as well as Akiko Yamashita, David Van Eyssen, Leah Smithson, Nate Mohler, Ryan P Griffin, Mark Hashimoto, and Elizabeth Leister.
About NXT Art/NOW Art
NXT Art is NOW ART’s charitable division whose mission is to elevate civic dialogue, diversity and inclusion, and cultural awareness. NOW Art is the only public art firm in Greater Los Angeles with for-profit and nonprofit organizations working in public art management.
NOW Art’s progressive approach intersects art, architecture, technology, and culture. We consult, curate, and design contemporary public artworks, experiential activations, and iconic landmarks that reframe urban landscapes and inspire cultural, social, and economic vitality. As a public art consulting firm, we work across all mediums, from functional to digital art, architectural façades to interiors, temporary to permanent, and private ownership to large-scale projects.
NXT Art /NOW Art (@nowart_la)
Lead Photo Credit: Sarah Rara Perfect Touch (2021), NXT Art @nowart_la. LUMINEX (2023) Photo by Koury Angelo
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