The lights in the planetarium dim and the theater seats automatically recline so viewers are almost supine, looking up at the domed ceiling. But instead of watching a canvas of the heavens, the audience is taken on a mysterious journey into inner space, led by the experimental performance artist from East L.A. known only as Gronk.
"Welcome into Gronk's brain and to a powerful new artist medium," states the promotional material for an unusual, 14-minute animated short film that makes its West Coast debut next Saturday at the Glendale Community College planetarium.
"Gronk's BrainFlame" visualizes the creative process at a cellular level by entering the mind of the artist at the moment ideas are born. Gronk, known for his dramatic installations and performance pieces, took two years to develop the digital project, considered a cutting-edge experiment in the melding of art, science and technology.
Using 180-degree projection, viewers are drawn into an animated, otherworldly landscape with sprouting pod-like forms and faceless, alien-like figures that move about under a canopy composed of squiggly lines and ambiguous shapes instead of stars and planets.
Gradually, we're aware of a new shape floating into view from another hemisphere. It starts in the form of a sperm but soon transforms into a brain, with a wiggling, wormy tail that grows until it almost touches the desert-like terrain. Suddenly, one of the creatures is sucked into the stem, winding through a canal in peaceful surrender before exploding into a cavity where his (or her) body falls apart, pieces bouncing off the walls erratically as the sound of sparks suggests the electrical firing of synapses.
Finally, out of the chaos, a piece of art takes shape.
I won't give away the ending of this brief, wordless drama, previewed for the media Tuesday, because the finale is an ingenious surprise.
A seminal figure in contemporary Chicano art, Gronk burst on the L.A. arts scene during the 1970s as part of ASCO, a guerrilla-style cultural collective whose name means nausea in Spanish. He has worked in a variety of media, including murals, line drawings, set designs for operas and performance paintings produced to the accompaniment of a string quartet, using his brush as a baton. This is the first time he has undertaken a digital project on such a large scale, with a domed canvas stretching 30 feet across.
