Next time you venture to the movie theater to see Dune Part Two or whatever, maybe think of Sara Velas’ panoramas.
Velas, 47, is trying to keep alive an art form that predates the motion picture: the panorama.
Once, meaning in the 19th century, the panorama was a very big deal. You’d go to see a vast landscape painting and hear sound and take in faux – OK, fake – three-dimensional terrain. Way back when, it passed for total sensory immersion.
Progress is inexorable. Wagon train, meet the Tesla. Panorama, meet the VR headset. Who in the year 2024 wants to keep something like the panorama alive, and why?
Someone who grew up fascinated with dinosaurs. Who runs a panorama museum, the Velaslavasay Panorama, in the film capital of the world. Whose diorama in the museum, the Nova Tushkut, is proclaimed the only Arctic trading post in the lower 48 states – please snuggle up on the bear pelt or check out the book on the wooden bookshelf by lantern light.
Someone who, let’s note, was born in Panorama City, California. At 8:08 p.m. on 1/8/77 – a numerological note she discovered on the phone with her mother as part of research toward her astrological chart for cosmic insight into her personality and life path.
We are far from done here.
Who added her own twist to the tradition of 19th-century panoramas, which typically were named after their creators or proprietors.
“I invented the word ‘Velaslavasay’ to use my last name, which is Velas, and that came from my father’s side,” Velas said. “Asay is my mother’s maiden name, so I thought it’d be nice to combine that. In the middle is Slav because I have some Slavic heritage.”
Behind the scenes at the museum, located in Los Angeles’ University Park neighborhood, Velas works with Ruby Carlson, 36. They met in 2008 when Carlson first visited the museum. Now they are close friends and collaborative partners.
“We have this shorthand, and we really trust each other’s sensibilities and styles, and we like the same things,” Carlson said. “What she thinks of is beyond me, beyond my brain, beyond most other people, and so it’s like tuning to a very off-beat AM station: ‘Wow, I didn’t even know this was a frequency available to us all.’ And it’s very liberating.”
All this zaniness began in the blandest place imaginable, the San Fernando Valley.
Velas grew up in Reseda until age 3. Then it was off a few miles west to Woodland Hills.
This, it would turn out, would prove fertile territory for a little girl’s big imagination.
Those dinosaurs in early childhood, Velas said, pulled her “into this dynamic world” of immersive experiences. One birthday, her aunts and uncles surprised her with a makeshift PlayDoh diorama on a board with fake plants and little plastic dinosaurs.
Then, during her first trip to Disneyland, on the Disneyland Railroad she sat, transfixed, as the train circled the perimeter of the park, then traversed a dark, narrow corridor that whisked visitors back in time through dioramas showcasing the Grand Canyon and the Land of the Dinosaurs.
“When I look at it now, I can see the relationship between the panoramas and dioramas tradition,” Velas said. “But at the time, I just thought this was a really amazing train journey.”
In college, she earned a bachelor’s in fine arts at Washington University in St. Louis.
Two years later, back in L.A., she founded the exhibition, considerably affected by her time in St. Louis.
“A lot of this had to do with a curiosity and almost obsession with 19th-century typography and the way that things were promoted,” Velas said. “I realized later that a lot of this had to do with a reflection on my time in St. Louis because St. Louis is a city that had so much kind of going for it in the mid-19th century.”
Once a potential rival to Chicago, St. Louis’s decline left abandoned and neglected areas with vacant lots and decrepit Victorian homes. Certain elements of Velas’ panoramas are still tied to a 19th-century sensibility.
Three years after opening the museum, she moved it to its current location.
For $7, this is what you get, currently on display, the Shengjing Panorama.
Ascending a creaky, winding staircase to the top floor, viewers enter a 360-degree painting of an early 20th-century Chinese landscape. Enhanced by a 40-minute ambient soundscape and a lighting cycle, visitors experience trains rushing by, church bells tolling and birds chirping while witnessing the city transition from warm, yellow daylight to nighttime’s bluish-gray sky.
“It’s not just the completed installation, which in and of itself is immersive, but it’s all the things leading up to it,” Velas said. “The emails and the things that Ruby and I work on together, and the graphics that we create, and the way that we talk about the things we’re going to share with people helps set a tone and set a mood that really changes the way people absorb them.”
Museum volunteer Sloane Sandler, 37, said being there is like living within the mystery game Clue – akin to entering a room filled with intriguing individuals drawn by Velas, each with a unique identity, profession and interests.
“She’s such like a visionary and she does it so modestly,” Sandler said. “I feel so grateful to be one of her friends because all of her other friends are so special and unique and wonderful as well. To be chosen by Sara is quite an honor. But I think everything I get from the panorama I also get outside of the panorama in interacting with Sara.”
Then again, no one can live in the 19th century all the time. Not even Velas.
“We’re always looking for an excuse to go on a field trip somewhere, even if it’s just to see an old painted sign or a weird billboard somewhere in the desert,” Carlson said. “We’ll go off, and it ends up informing an exhibit that we put together five years later. You never know. Visiting other panoramas and thinking of our work here in the canon of like panorama history is a really important aspect.”
“So much of doing this has been also about the impossibility of being a cultural space in L.A. that the funding for being a nonprofit is very prohibitive,” Velas said. “I still sort of can’t believe I’ve kept it going for this long, and I wouldn’t keep doing this if I didn’t feel like people were responding to it.”