The City of Santa Monica and Sloan Projects, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Our Town creative placemaking program, presents Projection for Two Stations (P2S), a projection installation by local artist Alia Malley, at Bergamot Station Arts Center.
The artwork debuted August 17, from 8 p.m to midnight. There will be a reception for the artist on Saturday August 20, from 7 p.m. – 9 p.m., at Sloan Projects in the Bergamot Station Arts Center.
The projection will be on view to the public from August 17th thru August 24th, nightly, from 8 PM to midnight, and will be visible from the Arts Center and from the Expo Line trains as they pass through the station. The artwork is the fourth in a series of six temporary art installations funded by the City’s 2013 NEA Our Town program grant.
Projection for Two Stations (P2S) was developed from the artist’s 2015 short video piece Christmas Eve in Panorama City (1:33 minute looped, color, single channel, silent, HD video), and will be projected on the northern exterior wall of Building D in Bergamot Station. The looping video will transform the parking lot of Bergamot Station Arts Center into a nightly pop-up drive-in movie. The work recalls the classic Southern California drive-in experience reinvented for pedestrians and train passengers. In her proposal, Malley wrote, “So often in contemporary urban life—especially while commuting on mass transit—we are self-sequestered in our own worlds, focused on the tiny screens of our handheld devices. P2S will disrupt this expectation, even if only momentarily. As the train passes through Bergamot Station, groups of passengers will be drawn to look up and experience the unexpected, together.”
The City of Santa Monica’s NEA Our Town grant was designed to support temporary public art interventions in and around the Bergamot Station Arts Center during the construction and after the opening of the new, multimodal transit hub. Previous activities for the program include Ed Moses, an ongoing installation by artist John Cerney, Amir H. Fallah’s Perfect Strangers Art and Performance Festival and Kate Johnson’s Everywhere in Between, an all-encompassing installation of video and light projections with live dance and music. The two latter projects were curated by one of the City’s Our Town partners, 18th Street Arts Center.
