Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you a review of But What You Want Is Far Away, a series of readings and performances that coincide with the exhibition Fertile Ground: Art and Community in California. Author Melissa Miller notes that the performance God Sees Everything “unfolded into an intuitive, poetic, and humorous portrait of contemporary California.” This article was originally published on December 2, 2014.

Phoebe Osborne. God Sees Everything, November 7, 2014 (performance still). Courtesy of the Artist and the Oakland Museum of California. Photo: Charlie Villyard.

In God Sees Everything, directed and choreographed by Phoebe Osborne, a complex weave of everything Californian coalesces. It is, in certain moments, “so L.A.” as dancers wearing the same blonde, bobbed wig move robotically across the stage. With glitter and glow sticks, God Sees Everything references the music-festivals scene, and with synchronized yoga postures and carrot eating it reaches toward new age. It also emerges from the numerous engagements with extraterrestrial life chronicled by individuals and cults within the state. God Sees Everything is all over the (western) map in terms of references, but each one of them is spot-on in terms of what epitomizes California. Osborne’s careful and sometimes absurd juxtapositions are both humorous and insightful; they point to a contemporary Californian identity that has been informed by a lengthy history of utopian projects.

Read the full article here.