Cosmic Art at Pepperdine

By Lookout Staff

March 22 -- Art aficionados have until Sunday to catch Santa Monica artist Lita Albuquerque's multimedia exploration of the cosmos at Pepperdine's Weisman Museum.

Visitors to the gallery are invited into a series of carefully orchestrated spaces where they are surrounded by images of stars and star-like patterns.

Videos, paintings and two- and three-dimensional star fields coalesce to "align the viewer to the stars and the connection to the stars," in Albuquerque's words. Images explode in particles of light and then contract, breathlike, or like the expansion of the universe.

A local artist with studio space at the 18th Street Arts Center, Albuquerque was recently chosen to design new banners for the Third Street Promenade, which she says she plans to make into "a visual poem."

She's also starting work on an installation at the South Pole, funded by the National Science Foundation, which she says will link both poles with an axis line.

Albuquerque represented the United States in the 1996 Cairo Biennale, where she won first prize with her astral projection of enormous blue dots on the sand around the Great Pyramids, which occupied the positions of the stars in Orion's belt in the pattern.

Her work can also be seen at the Washington Monument, the California State Capitol and closer to home in downtown Los Angeles at the Cathedral of Our Lady, where her star map greets visitors as they enter the courtyard.

The Pepperdine installation will run through Sunday, March 26 and will be the last chance to see her art locally until June, when she will create a smaller installation at the Patricia Faure Gallery at Bergamot Station.

The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, on the Malibu campus of Pepperdine University is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11a.m. to 5p.m. Admission is free. For more information, call (310) 506-4851 or see the museum website.