LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.- There's a mystery afoot here and you'll have to come to the gallery to see what the knitting hands on the postcard have to do with our curved brick wall. All that we can say is that it's heavy. (No, we're not being nostalgic for the 60's.) On Saturday, November 20, 2004, come as our special guest to the opening celebration of Mariel Carranza's massive installation "Booties Wall" here at Dangerous Curve. We'll have free chair massages by soulful Tricia Schaumann and again lots of amazing healthy food by master chef John Saslow. The brilliant Tania Hammidi is the designated performance artist for the night. The Bushes, over-the-top art-school semiotic rappers, and monster music experimentalist Bob Bellerue are the live music for the evening. We're located at 1020 East Fourth Place, between Molino and Mateo Streets, in the back of the 500 Molino Street Lofts, #102, between the Fourth Street Bridge's two on/off ramps. The exhibit runs until December 11, when there's a Performance Art and Experimental Music/Film Night (see below) to close the show. During exhibits, the gallery is open every Wednesday through Saturday, 1:00 to 6:00 p.m. See for directions, events, pictures, and updates.

Until you get here, "Booties Wall" is largely a mystery, but this is what (paraphrased) the artist is willing to tell you: the installation is, of course, site-specific. It uses the gallery's [curved] brick wall as a metaphor for rigid [social] conditioning that, according to the artist, must be demolished. The resulting single bricks would still aggregate into a monolithic force, though, that would carry ideological baggage from one generation to the next. Booties represent but small steps in creating a New Order, weighted down as they are by the old structure.

Mariel Carranza is an exquisite artist from Peru now living in Los Angeles. In a Downtown window display at the Gallery Row Unveiling last May, she painted out the spots of a Dalmation so it would blend into the white tulle behind the two of them. In August at Dangerous Curve, she used the personalities of two dogs who couldn't be more different, in both looks and temperament, to create a work that made your hair stand on end.

Mariel's work is always visually compelling and genuine in effort. A graduate of UCLA (B.A./M.F.A.), she is renowned for her durational performance installation piece, "Corners," seen at Crazy Space this last year, wherein she fasted for nine days while weaving and crocheting herself into a room-size installation. She in fact uses fasting in her ongoing healing process, whereby she battles with Menier's Disease. She brings such conviction to everything she does. In a visually stunning installation at Full Nelson, she ate lemons for hours, staring in a trance at the documenting camera. At another Crazy Space event, she repeatedly bumped into a wall, painstakingly sifting blue powder placed on her forehead down the front of her clothes. She's had several solo exhibitions of her visual work (at Elena Zass Gallery and Artopia Gallery), and been in twice more group exhibitions.

Dangerous Curve is committed to supporting visionary established and emerging artists of all ages, by emphasizing one-person shows of risky, intelligent work that is not necessarily commercially viable nor currently popular. Dangerous Curve is a new venue for both experimental exhibits/installations and performance/live art, with performance residencies, and a performance art festival planned.