Last weekend, squeezed in somehow between camping trip preparation meetings, Spring Sing, and the last coffee house of the year, I managed to grab a few hours, a Suburban, and seven eager sophomores for a quick trip to Los Angeles to take in some culture. Our destination: my friend, Thacher classmate, and advisee’s father Johannes Girardoni’s solo exhibition entitled Off and On at Nye & Brown in Culver City. The idea for the visit came from my advisee when she discovered that she would be camping during the official opening of the show, and she desperately wanted to see the fruits of her father’s hard labor. So, we put our heads together, compared busy schedules, and discovered a window on Saturday afternoon. She invited some friends, we piled into a Suburban, and headed off to Los Angeles.
The exhibit “presents two new large scale interactive installations which convert light to sound: Chromasonic Field – Blue/Green and Metaspace V2.” The experience is completely indescribably; suffice it to say, we were all completely awed by what we saw.
After about an hour, in which we all got to interact with the installations (entering an aluminum orb that looks like it could have been designed by Frank Gehry and watching the movements we made being transformed into light), we headed to Abbott Kinney (a super-hip L.A. neighborhood) to pick up some delicious pizzas and salad from Gjelina. From there, we walked around the corner to the Girardonis’ house for a garden supper, topped off by homemade desserts made by Johannes’s Austrian mom. We were reluctant to depart, but we had to head back to Ojai so that one of the group could join a band performing in the coffee house.
As we wove our way through the streets of Santa Monica on the way back to school, the van talk turned to commentary on the upcoming Extra Day Trips. I couldn’t help but draw the parallel between our adventures in the urban jungle and those in which the students will partake in the next few days. Two very different landscapes but both center around the provision of opportunities for contemplation of beauty, camaraderie, and memory formation.