Happenings

OPaf (Other Places Art Fair)
Saturday, September 27, 2025, 11am - 6pm
Battery Leary – Merriam, Angels Gate Cultural Center, 3601 S. Gaffey St, San Pedro, CA 90731

The Art of Failure
An Experimental Installation by Yucca Valley Material Lab

This is not a show of polished outcomes. Instead, it foregrounds risk, improvisation, and uncertainty. It honors the moments when control slipped, when mistakes became breakthroughs, and when works that once felt unresolved now resonate in new contexts.

We embrace failure not as an endpoint, but as an essential catalyst in the creative process. Bringing together artists from our ecosystem, through residencies, workshops, and exhibitions, the project explores failure as a generative, liberating force.

The installation will feature Nathan Ober and Lara Saget. Ober’s self-perpetuating conceptual harps generate meditative tones and explore sustainability and sonic feedback loops. The harps’ frames, fabricated from mud-caked offcuts salvaged after a bridge collapse in Northern California, carry the imprint of infrastructural failure, reanimated as instruments of resilience. Saget’s practice treats failure as an essential collaborator, using repeated trial, error, and material experimentation to uncover unlikely unions that feel both accidental and inevitable.

A central element will be a low plinth scattered with fragments and remnants—failed forms and material trials salvaged from the Lab—that embody the spirit of experimentation. The presentation will offer a wide array of materials and methods: sound, touch, repair, improvisation, and provisional structures.

The Art of Failure is a microcosm of what YVML nurtures: artists willing to engage with material and conceptual unknowns, to stay with the unfinished, and to make meaning from the mess.