On the last Sunday of the month starting in March 2010, LAVA welcomes interested individuals to gather on the third floor of the historic Clifton’s Cafeteria in Downtown Los Angeles (noon-2pm), for a loosely structured conversational Salon featuring short presentations and opportunities to meet and connect with one another. If you’re interested in joining LAVA as a creative contributor or an attendee, we recommend Salon attendance as an introduction to this growing community. We also recommend the shortbread.

• Collaborative functional artist and LAVA Visionary A. Laura Brody, freshly back from KC, MO (where she’s been helping start up Pistol Threads’ new fashion line) will demonstrate live performance draping with re-purposed fabrics, staples and scissors. It’s live, full-contact sculpture! If you’ve already seen her first LAVA demonstration at the June 2010 Salon, this is a different style, redefined by her recent public drapings for Kansas City’s infamous Dr. Sketchy’s burlesque life drawing classes. Get a preview (filmed by Don Maxwell and presented by Pistol Threads’ Christel Highland)! . At the Salon, Laura will be creating 2+ full garments which she’ll later re-create as patterns. The patterns will then be used as part of the upcoming fashion line for Dreams By Machine. While she’ll be bringing in a model for this process, audience participation is encouraged. If you have the time, come and be draped… and yes, commissions are welcome. Just bring your ideas in with your bodies!

• LAVA Visionary Michael Risner will have a show and tell presentation on the archives of a local Japanese-American photographer which he accidentally rescued from Craigslist and certain destruction. There are well over 100,000 individual photographs in this rescued archive. Discover the beauty and art of the this amazing archive, with images from weddings to funerals, baby portraits to community events. Risner will explain his plans for preserving and displaying the archive while showing off some highlights from the collection.

• LAVA Visionary Eva Montealegre, who at at a past Salon discussed her crime fiction, returns to the Sunday Salon wearing her fine artist’s hat. She will bring paintings from her Topanga home studio gallery, share her artist’s adventure and talk about the development of her style with a focus on her recent oil painting series LUMINOSITY. The work in this series is created with layers of textures and colors evoking sometimes explosive flows of energy. Eva’s intent is to capture energetic “truths,” and to create a dance of color and form that manifests in a dreamlike conveyance of everything from whimsy to drama. You can visit her website and send a request certain that paintings be brought to the Salon.

Clifton’s Cafeteria is at 648 South Broadway, near the corner of 7th Street. There are numerous paid parking lots nearby, and the closest Metro station is Pershing Square.