Cults, Collectives and Cocooning

It's the 18th Street Art Center's birthday. The Santa Monica art center began in 1988 as the headquarters for High Performance magazine and soon grew to provide live-work spaces for approximately 30 tenants from a variety of backgrounds. Now 18th Street is a thriving exhibition and residency space and it's celebrating its 20 year mark with an exhibition curated by Ciara Ennis.
The exhibition opened on May 2nd with an lively ArtNight (the center often hosts 'ArtNights,' evenings that feature performances, screenings, or happenings). 18th Streets studios were open to the public, a performance by the LA Poverty Department, Art Karaoke, and a graffiti demonstration.
The exhibition in the main gallery, Cults, Collectives and Cocooning, imagines an LA of the near future, one in which the suburban sprawl is subverted by a return to self-reliant, village-like communities. The work included is low-tech with a Do-It-Yourself aesthetic: William Ransom's transient compost cart, Nuttaphol Ma's lemongrass tearoom, Cathy Akers' diorama made of cake. It's a fugitively optimistic array of work that doesn't pioneer a new path into the future as much as it reminds us of the sustainable options that are already available to us.