November 4, 2021–January 9, 2022
Laguna Art Museum Art + Nature Festival
Opening: November 4, 6–9 PM
Open and free to the public

Any-Instant-Whatever, 2020
2-channel video projection, color, sound. 90 minutes, loop. 16 x 39 feet. Captured in Los Angeles in winter 2019–2020. Sound composition by Drew Schnurr.

Rebeca Méndez is a Los Angeles based artist who uses design, photography and video to connect the human experience to the environment and ecological issues of our time. Her monumental artwork Any-Instant-Whatever is a study of the Los Angeles sky filmed from sunrise to sunset on a sunny January day. Using Time-Slice Video, Méndez presents 48 vertical bands of moving sky, wind and variations of light and color. Together they represent 12 hours of time, each band 15 minutes of time ahead of the next. The technique impresses upon us that the progression of time and the forces at play in our atmosphere are ever in motion, inspiring and unifying us through the physics of light and sensation.

The video still images in this gallery freeze time and allow the eye to rest upon the complexity of the clouds and the spectrum of refracted blue light we experience in a day. Inside the gallery, and of equal importance to the video presentation, is a sound piece by Drew Schnurr. Crystal like water vapor naturally refracts light. The composition was created from playing crystal bowls tuned with water, digitized and played back in layers. The result brings union between visual frequencies and sound frequencies.

Any-Instant-Whatever asks us to be mindful of the non-human creatures who share our sky—especially those that use it as a critical path of migration from the far reaches of the north to the most southern skies of our planet. Light, noise, structures and pollutants—these human-added elements change the shared sky space for us all, and effect those who are the most vulnerable disproportionately.