Welcome to Alta Sketchbook, your guide to Getty’s PST Art: Art & Science Collide festival.
PST Art is the largest art event in the United States. For nearly two months, Alta Sketchbook published insightful critiques on the many exhibitions and artists exploring the collision of art and science through exhibitions across Southern California. This week’s newsletter is the final installment. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading!
To read previous coverage, visit Alta Sketchbook: PST Art.
For three months in 2020, Kevin “Konkrete” Davis Jr. worked on the floor at an Amazon fulfillment center in Sacramento, working to save up money between dance projects in Los Angeles. The professional dancer is known for competing in TV contest shows like So You Think You Can Dance and World of Dance, performing in Beyonce’s “Renaissance” tour, and two-stepping behind Ryan Gosling in the actor’s “I’m Just Ken” rendition at the Academy Awards. Recently, Konkrete returned to familiar territory: an Amazon warehouse, this time in Oxnard, to dance on camera for Doug Aitken’s Lightscape, a complex multimedia project for Getty’s PST Art: Art & Science Collide festival, in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. In the film, Konkrete krumps—referring to an expressive freestyle dance that incorporates quick movement with arm swings, chest pops, and stomps—in front of a conveyor belt, lifting boxes between moves and gliding his forearms parallel to the machinery’s metallic skeleton.
“Lightscape is a polyphonic work in the sense that it merges and crosses over many different mediums, from contemporary art to live music to film, installation, and dance,” Aitken says. In addition to the experimental film, which premieres at Walt Disney Concert Hall on November 16, Lightscape includes an immersive seven-screen installation and weekly live music at the Marciano Art Foundation.
Aitken’s work is a portrait of the West Coast, from its vast valleys to robotic factories. Through music and dance, the artist captures the complexities of what it means to be a contributor, both consciously and unconsciously, to the changing environment. “I think much of what we receive in film or in culture is black and white—right or wrong—and it often has a predictable narrative and a convenient conclusion,” Aitken says. “With Lightscape, I want to see if we can create friction in a different direction.”
While filming in the 2.3-million-square-foot Amazon warehouse, Aitken and Konkrete found patterns and rhythms from machine sounds. (Aitken recalls unconsciously tapping his foot to the clicks and beeps.) Then they built out the choreography, collaborating and improvising within Aitken’s overarching themes. In one scene, Konkrete freestyles his way down a hallway, something he used to do years ago before a shift at the Sacramento facility.
Aitken had met Konkrete in the spring while filming a group shot for Lightscape at the Marciano Art Foundation. Konkrete’s dancing stood out. “I was watching how fast his movement was, how precise,” Aitken says. “It was incredibly expressive, almost like an expressionistic painting, like Max Beckmann. But other times it had this precision that was automated.” After wrapping, Aitken asked Konkrete to perform in the warehouse scene. It was a full-circle moment for Konkrete, who, since he was a teenager, worked in a warehouse off and on whenever he wanted a stable counterbalance to his creative career. Even then, he always found time to dance. Konkrete recalls using Amazon boxes as a prop in his choreography. At lunch, he’d search for song and movement ideas on his phone.
Filming Lightscape reopened those familiar channels of creativity for him: “I could just be free and pick whatever I wanted to do and manipulate it into a dance move.” That kind of expression, Konkrete says, “gets my gears running.”•
LIGHTSCAPE
Nov. 16, 8 p.m.
Walt Disney Concert Hall
111 S. Grand Ave.
Steven’s Must-Sees
STORM CLOUD: PICTURING THE ORIGINS OF OUR CLIMATE CRISIS
How did we get into the climate crisis? This exhibition uses archival artwork and ephemera of industrialization to document how technological expansion—from oil rigs to clothing fabrics—affects the environment, past and present. Through Jan. 6, the Huntington
BLUE GOLD: THE ART AND SCIENCE OF INDIGO
Indigo is used everywhere, from traditional garments in West Africa to architectural structures in the United States. This show digs into the blue dye’s history to uncover its scientific importance and cultural ramifications. Through Mar. 16, Mingei International Museum
Upcoming Shows
DIGITAL WITNESS: REVOLUTIONS IN DESIGN, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND FILM
Nov. 24, 2024–July 13, 2025, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
PIGEONBLOG LAUNCH AND WORKSHOP
Nov. 16, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
IS HE OR ISN’T HE? MAN FACING SOUTHEAST / THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET
Nov. 9, Billy Wilder Theatre, Hammer Museum
Related Coverage
“Doug Aitken Feature Film ‘Lightscape’ to Debut in November,” Ocula
“Are Art and Science Forever Divided? Or Are They One and the Same?,” New York Times
“Doug Aitken: ‘The World I Would Like to Live in Is Without Silos or Boundaries',” A Rabbit’s Foot
Steven Vargas is an actor, a dancer, and a journalist based in Los Angeles whose work focuses on the intersections of media, social justice, and performance. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, E! News, USA Today, Dance Magazine, ARTnews, and more. He runs an independent weekly newsletter, LA Art Spot.
