CONDUIT 742 - Art by Artists

For Immediate Release: CONDUIT 742 Presents Its Next Pop-up Show Less Art Cabaret #1 Featuring Doug Harvey’s Moldy Slide Show with Live Soundtrack by Rick Potts, Plus Unseen Documentaries, Experimental Musicals, and More Inside Mount Wilson Observatory’s Auditorium & Museum Saturday Afternoon, April 4, 2026 LOS ANGELES, CA – March 14, 2026 – CONDUIT 742, a pop-up dedicated to presenting art by artists, presents the inaugural Less Art Cabaret—this time on top of a mountain—inside Mount Wilson Observatory’s auditorium on Saturday, April 4, 2026 from 2:00–6:00pm. Titled Less Art Cabaret #1, the afternoon program centers on Los Angeles multidisciplinary artist Doug Harvey’s long-running Moldy Slide Show project, accompanied by a live improvised soundtrack by legendary Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) founding member Rick Potts. Compiled from thousands of mold-altered 35mm transparencies rescued from an Edendale hoarder intervention some 25 years ago, the newly configured slideshow marks the first live projection of the work in a decade. Moldy Slide. Courtesy of Doug Harvey. Bay Area artist and songwriter Paulette Humanbeing serves as MC, introducing an afternoon lineup that also includes artists and filmmakers Daniel Hawkins, Marnie Weber, and Tom Christie, along with innovative artist/pastry chef Kelsey Kuykendall. Concurrently, Mount Wilson Observatory’s museum (located in the same building) will preview a new edition of three-color carbon transfer prints produced from a selection of the moldy slides, curated by Harvey and the master printer at ƒ/Ø Projects. Tickets are $5; for more information or to purchase in advance, please visit https://mtwilson.app.neoncrm.com/nx/portal/neonevents/events?path=%2Fportal%2Fevents%2F39392. . Doug Harvey Moldy Slides Series – Gum Bichromate 20×24 inches, Unique Monoprints, 2026. Printed and published by The ƒ/Ø Project. Harvey—an artist, writer, and longtime Los Angeles art critic whose work spans painting, collage, found objects, film, sound, and performance—has presented variations of the Moldy Slide Show for more than two decades, periodically recombining the flood-damaged and fungus-altered images into new sequences accompanied by live music. This new event series is part of the ongoing evolution of Harvey’s long-running Less Art project, which began in the mid-1980s as a zine and later expanded into broadcast formats. For Less Art Cabaret #1, Rick Potts (also known for projects including Airway, Dinosaurs With Horns, Gothic Hut, Human Hands, Le Forte Four, Solid Eye…) provides the improvised soundtrack. Rick Potts with his brother Joe in the background. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen Attendees are encouraged to come and go (quietly) from the main presentation and explore the Observatory grounds. Bring a picnic lunch to enjoy. Parental Discretion from the Producers: Though the show is family friendly, the program may contain spooky images, dark humor, and whale attacks. PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS: In addition to her MC duties, Humanbeing will present the first public screening of her visionary DIY musical-in-progress, The Worst Christmas Story, and fill in the technical gaps throughout the afternoon with her distinctive songcraft. The film follows a man who, after being knocked unconscious by a falling Christmas tree, awakens to a vision of God who tells him to quit his job and take his family whale-watching in Cape Cod. Antics ensue. Worst Christmas Story Partial Cast Photo. Photo by Paulette Nichols. The program continues with a rare return to the screen for Marnie Weber’s short film Mel’s Hole, marking its first public showing since debuting in the 2008 exhibition Aspects of Mel’s Hole. The museum show was inspired by a story told by a caller to Art Bell’s talk radio program in 1997 about paranormal phenomena surrounding a supposedly bottomless pit on the caller’s own property in rural Washington. Weber’s film revisits the tale of that caller, Mel Waters, who claimed that the pit on his property in Ellensburg could—according to myth—bring dead animals back to life. Marnie Weber, Production still from Mel’s Hole. Photo by LeeAnn Nickel, 2008. Another highlight of the afternoon is a rare theatrical screening of Daniel Hawkins’ film Desert Lighthouse: A Point of Origin, a documentary exploring the construction of, landscape surrounding, and local response to a 50-foot fully functioning lighthouse built in the Mojave Desert. Completed in 2017 near Hinkley, California, the octagonal steel-and-polycarbonate structure—illuminated at night—stands as one of Hawkins’ improbable landscape interventions. Daniel Hawkins’ Desert Lighthouse, a fully functioning lighthouse in the Mojave Desert, illuminated at night Photo by Daniel Hawkins. The world premiere of Moving Serra, a documentary-in-progress by Tom Christie, rounds out the program. The film documents the transport of Richard Serra’s 242-ton sculpture Sequence as it traveled 2,700 miles from Manhattan’s MoMA to L.A.’s LACMA in 2007, beautifully photographed and focusing on the personalities of the truckers who transported this massive work of art. Moving Serra photo courtesy of 334point5 Productions/Moving Serra. All filmmakers will be present at the screening. For hungry attendees, Baking Praxis will provide artisanal baked goods by Kelsey Kuykendall, featuring unique offerings (possibly including faux-moldy cake). Delicious pastry by Kelsy Kuykendall. Photo courtesy of the chef. ABOUT DOUG HARVEY Doug Harvey’s artwork encompasses a myriad of media including painting, film, video, performance, and sound. His many exhibits include over a dozen solo shows at artist-run L.A. galleries including POST, High Energy Constructs, and Jancar Gallery. His ongoing series, The Moldy Slide Show, has been exhibited internationally and throughout Los Angeles including The Hammer Museum, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, and the California Museum of Photography. His curatorial projects have ranged from traditional gallery and museum exhibitions to career surveys of SoCal legends Rick Griffin and Don Suggs to CD compilations of sound art, performance events, artists’ comic books, and zines. www.instagram.com/dghrvy RICK POTTS Rick Potts is an improviser and instrument maker who has been on the musical fringe of Los Angeles for decades. He’s a homemade sound explorer and founding member of the Los Angeles Free Music Society (L.A.F.M.S.). Rick produces sounds which are unique and compelling with his custom hinge-neck guitar, musical saw, samplers and synthesizers. He has recorded and performed with Dinosaurs with Horns, Solid Eye, Airway, Le Forte Four, and Extended Organ. Solo performances and collaborations with other experimental musicians have taken him around Japan, Europe, and the U.S. Besides playing with his LAFMS associates Joseph Hammer, Joe Potts, Tom Recchion, John Duncan, Mike Kelley, and Paul McCarthy, as well as Smegma and the rest of the crew, Potts has performed with Chris Cutler, Don Preston, Keiji Haino, Jojo Hiroshige, Thomas Dimuzio, Otomo Yoshihide, and others. https://rickpotts.com/home.html https://krimkram.bandcamp.com/album/dont-think PAULETTE NICHOLS Paulette Humanbeing (née Nichols) was born as a biological male in the late 1960s and grew up in Stockton, California, a port city in the San Joaquin Delta. She began piano lessons at 11—her teacher thought she might be a reincarnated bebopper because she seemed to make bebop melodies naturally—and Paulette picked up guitar at 16. Paulette spent seven years drifting in and out of college, switching majors from Engineering to English to Music and back again, eventually realizing that no matter what she studied, she was still transgender. It simply wouldn’t go away. Paulette later worked at a stock brokerage firm as a wire operator and assistant trader before leaving to write. Instead of fiction, Paulette made an album of songs about her neighborhood titled Rockridge. While subletting an apartment in New York City, Paulette once ran into Lou Reed in a neighborhood café; when she told him she’d made Rockridge after hearing his album New York, he put his hand on her shoulder, said “great,” and walked away. Paulette eventually drove to Los Angeles, met her cousin Mr. Let’s Paint TV, and began painting while working at a local art store, eventually selling her work. Paulette also made the film Worst Christmas Story after noticing how many bad Christmas movies there were and deciding it might be fun to make one. www.pauletteinternational.com paulettehumanbeing.bandcamp.com Characters from The Worst Christmas Story. Photo by Paulette Nichols. DANIEL HAWKINS Daniel Hawkins was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1987, and lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied art at UCLA, Yale’s Norfolk Summer School of Art, and UC Irvine, and has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at: UC Riverside’s Barbara and Art Culver Center for the Arts, PJCT LA, CMay Gallery, Las Cienegas Projects, UC Irvine’s Contemporary Arts Center, and more. Frequently combining the deliberate undertaking of Sisyphean tasks (building an actual size replica of the Hoover Dam) with explorations of the aesthetics of plausible deniability (infiltrating a reality television show about bizarre food addictions), Hawkins’ oeuvre explores cycles of grandiosity, failure, and rationalization through a battery of sculptural, architectural, land art, and performative strategies, while incorporating diverse media from printmaking, drawing, and painting, to video, sound art, and digital imaging. Desert Lighthouse: A Point of Origin is the first installment in a multi-part documentary chronicling the creation of a fully functioning lighthouse in the heart of the Mojave Desert. Desert Lighthouse (2017 – Present) is a full size functioning lighthouse located in the Mojave Desert on the outskirts of Hinkley, California. Since its inaugural lighting in 2017, Desert Lighthouse has provided nearly uninterrupted illumination to a complex area of California’s High Desert. Located on the edge of the PG&E Hexavalent Chromium environmental disaster made famous by Erin Brockovich—and surrounded by militarized airspace—Desert Lighthouse has become a beacon of hope for locals who have faced decades of environmental and economic challenges. www.desertlighthouse.org www.danielhawkins.la Daniel Hawkins’ Desert Lighthouse, a fully functioning lighthouse in the Mojave Desert MARNIE WEBER Marnie Weber is a multidisciplinary artist living in Los Angeles. Her practice encompasses performance, film, video, sculpture, collage, music and costuming. By combining her own mythology of creatures, monsters, animals and female characters with costuming on film and stage sets she creates her own fictional narratives of passion, transformation, and discovery. Weber creates uncanny worlds that exist in a realm between fantasy and reality, and invites viewers into an exploration of the subconscious. Using fairytale-like imagery, she places women in positions of power and primacy creating a backdrop as a site of transformation and magic. Weber’s work was the subject of a retrospective at Magasin in Grenoble France and a twenty-five-year survey exhibition at MAMCO (Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva). Most recently her work was exhibited at Heidi Gallery Berlin, Gavlak Los Angeles, as well as the 2020 Busan Biennale in South Korea. Additionally, she has had video screenings and performances throughout the U.S., Asia and Europe. She has made 20 films and videos, the latest of which House of the Whispering Rose had its Los Angeles premiere in November at the Philosophical Research Society. www.marnieweber.com Production still from Marnie Weber’s Mel’s Hole. Photo by LeeAnn Nickel, 2008 TOM CHRISTIE Tom Christie is a writer living in Los Angeles and Berlin. From 1997-2012, he was arts editor at the L.A. Weekly. On the origin of his in-progress film, Moving Serra, Christie says: “In 2006, Richard Serra’s tilted-arc sculpture ‘T.E.U.C.L.A.’ arrived at the port of Los Angeles on its way to its new home at UCLA. I arrived at the shipyard at 6:00am, and followed the trucks carrying it through residential neighborhoods and down the I-405 to its new home at UCLA. This gave me a unique perspective, watching the massive two-piece art work move down quiet streets, clipping trees and barely fitting under overpasses. The whole thing felt like a performance. Months later, when I interviewed Serra at LACMA, I told him about my experience and said that it would be cool to follow his large works across the country. Serra said, ‘Yes, that’s a good idea. You should do that.’ So I did: In 2007, a small camera crew and I followed 12 flatbed semis and an intriguing mix of drivers as they hauled the monumental 235-ton ‘Sequence’ from MoMA to LACMA. Moving Serra is a record of that trip.” www.instagram.com/tomxchristie From Moving Serra Photo courtesy of 334point5 Productions/Moving Serra. KELSEY KUYKENDALL Kelsey Kuykendall is a multimedia artist born, raised, and educated in Southern California. Working with found domestic substrates such as mattresses, carpet padding, upholstery, and tablecloths, Kuykendall employs resin to preserve materials in a state of decomposition, drape, or collapse. Many of her sculptural ideas also find expression in her Baking Praxis project, which entangles the ephemeral gendered sculptural forms of pies, cakes, and pastries with relational and transactional situationism. https://www.kelseykuykendall.com Kelsey Kuykendall at KCRW PieFest 3.14.26. Photo courtesy of the chef. LESS ART Less Art began as a photocopied collage zine in the mid-80s, and later reimagined as a cable access pilot, a radio show, this blog, and now as a series of curated performance/ screenings known as Less Art Cabarets. The recently revived radio show broadcasts on the first Tuesday of each month on KPBJ-FM 95.9 Shadow Hills. Less Art Radio Zine episodes are archived at https://www.kpbj.fm/shows/doug-harveys-less-art-radio-zine. THE MOLDY SLIDE SHOW Compiled from a collection of several thousand 35 mm photographic transparencies found in the detritus of an excavated house, the so-called “Moldy Slides” were the victims of a flood that transformed some of the images into total abstraction. Harvey describes the result as “a stochastically linked collaboration between the original vacation photographer, crazy hoarder dude, the mold, and me – plus the found and improvised soundtrack elements, and finally the audience.” The ƒ/Ø PROJECT The ƒ/Ø Project [f-zero] is a printmaking and publishing studio designed to rethink the nature of the photographic object by starting again from the beginning. The aim is to marry the technologies of photographic history with artists from the contemporary world, giving them the opportunity to expand their vocabulary by working in a wider variety of photographic printmaking techniques. Built on the model of twentieth-century printmaking studios like Gemini or Tamarind, rather than that of a photo-lab, ƒ/Ø Project makes collaborative work with artists making unique and editioned works. f-zeroproject.com Mel Bochner, Albumen print from collodion negative. From the series Photography Before the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Courtesy The ƒ/Ø Project MOUNT WILSON OBSERVATORY Since its founding in 1904 by astronomer and visionary George Ellery Hale, the research conducted at Mount Wilson Observatory has revolutionized our understanding of the Universe. Perched on top of Mount Wilson, a 5,710-foot peak in the San Gabriel Mountains near Pasadena, California, the Observatory boasts a rich history and significant contributions to science and the heritage of Los Angeles. The Observatory’s 100-inch Telescope—the world’s largest telescope from 1917 to 1949—forever changed our understanding of the scale and nature of our Universe and deeply expanded human knowledge. This world-heritage class instrument, used by many of the greatest astronomers of the Twentieth Century, launched a revolution in astronomy that continues through today. LOCATION Mount Wilson Observatory’s Auditorium Mount Wilson Circle Road & Mount Wilson Toll Road Mount Wilson, CA 91023 On MWO’s website, the “Map” page shows various SoCal routes to the 2 and 210 Freeways which feed into Angeles Crest Highway leading to Red Box Road, which then leads to Mount Wilson Circle Road. PLEASE NOTE: Do not rely on directions given by phone apps, they can be incorrect. We recommend downloading and printing this PDF map with directions. The Observatory’s 100-inch dome & grounds nestled in the San Gabriel Mountains. Photo courtesy of Mount Wilson Institute. LINKS: Less Art Cabaret #1 tickets – https://mtwilson.app.neoncrm.com/nx/portal/neonevents/events?path=%2Fportal%2Fevents%2F39392 Mount Wilson Observatory – https://www.mtwilson.edu For more information, photos, interviews, or press passes, please contact Green Galactic’s Lynn Tejada at lynn@greengalactic.com or 213-840-1201.