Velaslavasay Panorama: A Poem in Three-Dimensions
An interview with Sara Velas and Ruby Carlson

Interview and Photography by Juliette Sandoval

Sara Velas, founder of Velaslavasay Panorama

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants.”
- Vladimir Nabokov

The above quote was used by Ruby Carlson to describe the project she co-manages with founder Sara Velas, known as the Velaslavasay Panorama, an exhibition hall that is home of “[…] the only 360° painted panorama west of the Mississippi” as the Panorama proudly advertises itself. The Panorama is in the center of Los Angeles, in the West Adams Historic District by the Museum of Natural History in the Union Theater, the oldest preserved movie theater in the city, it was built in 1910. According to Velaslavasay’s official website, there is the following to see while you are there:

*A Traditional 360-degree Panorama*: Shengjing Panorama
*Ancillary Salon Exhibits*: Nova Tuskhut
*Gardens of the Illustrious Pacific Ring*

Velaslavasay appears to be from a bygone time of World’s Fairs and the imaginative technologies of a lost golden age. Driving through the historic district to get there you can feel the decay of decadence past, a Los Angeles that once was, a paradise of the Far West with orange groves and the remains of Babylon from D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. The Hollywood sign is keenly felt thought just out of view. The city is filled with palm trees and the flocks of green parrots, both non-native specimen to Los Angeles that the city has adopted as naturally as Disneyland. I didn’t know what to expect to find when I arrive to Velaslavasay, the research I have done to prepare still leaves me with more questions than answers.




















The day I went the sky was grey, and in this part of the city you can sense the wandering specters of previous generations. Entering into Velaslavasay only heightens this uncanny sensation of stepping into a lost and forgotten time, invoking a specter of nostalgia (did this time ever exist at all?). You find yourself in a foyer with Tiffany lamps on lace squares and a darkened hallway. A sign says the Nova Tuskhut Exhibit is temporarily closed. In the distance is the sound of a train station. When I first arrive Sara invites me to explore the space before we sit for our interview. I walk up the spiral staircase and the sound of the train stations grows a little louder. It is then I enter my first panorama portraying a historic scene of Shengjing city from about a hundred years ago. It’s hard to describe the experience of a panorama. You are aware of something always beyond the periphery, you are completely immersed in its world, the sun rises and sets in this miniature Shengjing in intervals of several minutes. It is mesmerizing. A couple sits in the panorama with me, they are whispering, trying to work out what they are experiencing. I think of Ruby quoting Nabokov - “Let visitors trip." I go on to look at the gardens, Sara points out different plants to me and stops to chat with visitors, we talk about corpse flower blooms. Los Angeles has all but disappeared by this point and all that remains is this place, which increasingly feels like a mirage or a fever dream, a surrealist Shangri-La. It’s the type of place that could only exist in Los Angeles, alongside the dream factory that is Hollywoodland. There are a couple Far Eastern shrines and the sun is starting to break through. I feel I have entered into a magic show and am waiting for the illusion to reveal itself.

A little bit later I get to sit with Sara and Ruby (and Ruby’s distinguished greyhound Penvelope) to talk in the theater part of the exhibit. I sit next to the head of a taxidermy antelope and Sara brings me a can of RC Cola. The space is lit by a dim, warm light. I feel like trying to capture this place is like trying to pin a butterfly, it’s impossibly elusive. Ruby and Sara perhaps put it best when they describe the space as an “experiment.” Sara goes on to say that it is like a “metaphorical or philosophical backdrop” and that “there is no wrong answer” in how visitors choose to interpret the space. As she puts it, “what the guest or the participants brings to it is going to inform their experience as much as what we’re putting out.” Sara gives the example of summer where an older couple came to see a performance at Velaslavasay, and at the time the panorama on display had been the "Effulgence of the North” - an Arctic scene. Upon seeing the panorama the couple came out and declared, “We’ve just been on a trip to the Moon.” That’s Velaslavasay Panorama. It could be the Arctic or the Moon. If Walt Disney designed Disneyland to be a “movie in three-dimensions” than Velaslavasay must be a poem in three-dimensions.





















In regards to the ‘experiment’ of Velaslavasay, Ruby comments, “Sara has often said that she started the project as a six month experiment. I sort of think of it as this is a 25-year prolonged six-month experiment because we still operate on this constantly experimental level where it seems like there both is and is not a master plan.” Later on, Sara elaborates on how this panoramic experiment even came to be, “While I was in St. Louis [for school] I also was spending time thinking about world’s fairs and 19th century visual culture and the city itself sort of had, at least for me, this whole heavy reflection of a former 19th century glory. So I was studying world’s fairs and learning about the panoramas as an art form and I was doing panorama-like projects and then I had an arts residency in Paris and used that as a chance to travel around Europe and see panoramas from the 19th century- that really excited me. And when I moved back to LA I was doing some odd jobs and was driving down the street one day when I saw a round building and I thought ‘I want to make a panorama there.’ And so that was the six-month experiment that then I decided to keep going.”

As to how Ruby got involved in the project, she first heard of Velaslavasay from friends as a “science fiction museum” and decided to visit, as she was “reading a lot of Stanislav Lem at the time.” She fell in love with the space and decided she wanted to work with Sara on the project.

I move on to trying to work out the different aspects of what Velaslavasay is exactly, and the way it blurs the lines between modern experimental art practices with a feeling of being steeped in some sort of history, though you're never really sure what that history may be and the time it's intended to invoke. Sara comments, “While we are playing with these historical modes, we’re not doing historical reenactment and there is a blurriness and having a little bit of ambiguity about that adds another layer of engagement if people want to go there but the interplay of making these experiments and being informed by historical research is a pretty consistent thread in a lot of the projects that we’ve done.”

Ruby returns to the quote by Nabokov to describe the space, “that quote is really great because its sort of thinking of the environmental architectural layout of like, we’re going to set up the living room and make sure the rug goes with the wallpaper but then we’re going to intentionally leave the rug a little strewn so that you might trip on it. Like there is this sort of setting up of a familiar and pleasing scenario but then we’re going to take a detour into something slightly less familiar or understandable in order to create this tension of having to stop and fill in some sort of blank. And so a lot of visitors that come have a lot of questions about the Panorama.”



















I then ask Sara and Ruby more broadly why we make art and why places like the Panorama are important. Ruby replies first, “I think art is a compulsion that people have an interest in. A lot of philosophers will talk about how a butterfly has a desire and compulsion to look certain way, to have like a certain visual aesthetic to its wings or to what is it’s attracted to in the world, you could look at it as like a desire compulsion place. I personally feel like it is a point of desire that is never completely fulfilled, which keeps people wanting to return to that place of art.” Sara responds in turn, “Art offers a third space in a way for saying things that can’t be said other ways. Whether we’re looking at art as a sort of release valve or an inspirational dreaming appendage, it offers something that we need.”

In regards to how they see Velaslavasay in the wider sphere of the arts and entertainment industry of Los Angeles, Ruby says, “I think a lot of what we do here is broadening the Hollywood industry to incorporate all the different aspects of Los Angeles culture, and these storytelling tropes and cliches infiltrate our lives on a day-to-day level, whether you're in America or not in America, in L.A., outside of L.A., it becomes a lot more of a ubiquitous and unavoidable thing.” Towards the end of the interview, Sara adds, “A lot of our resonant sister institutions, for lack of a better term, are also places that are hard to define and categorize.” She mentions Rubel Castle, Zorthian Ranch, the Holy Land Exhibition, and the Magic Castle as some of these institutions she feels relate to what the Velaslavasay is doing, Sara refers to them as fellow “folk art environments.”

As to the future of Velaslavasay Panorama, Sara and Ruby mention hopes of hosting the 2027 International Panorama Council Conference in partnership with Forest Lawn Museum. Ruby sums it up by simply saying, “We hope we can keep doing this.” The interview concludes and eventually Sara and Ruby (and Penvelope) disperse. I spend some more time after that wandering the gardens, sitting outside, thinking about the “dream appendage” known as Velaslavasay Panorama. I watch a young girl playing in the Garden of the Illustrious Pacific Ring, she is gathering the large leaves that have fallen from a strange-looking carnivorous flower. I visited the Panorama for this piece in September and it is now January. As I think back on it now, the Panorama still eludes me in trying to capture it, the memory of it continues to provoke my imagination, the more I dwell on it, the more it mystifies. Maybe some things are best left undefined- let the Panorama be the unpinned butterfly that operates by dream logic, and, yes, let visitors trip.

Sara Velas (L) and Ruby Carlson (R) work on fixing a display

Ruby and her dog, Penvelope

the Velaslavasay gift shop at the entrance

Gardens of the Illustrious Pacific Ring

Shengjing Panorama

Sound by Velaslavasay Panorama, using some original materials by Lindsay Cooper & Sally Potter