“Los Angeles is always rewriting history incorrectly,” says Drew Heitzler, the multidisciplinary artist spotlighting the Pacific Palisades, an LA neighborhood credited with all manner of residents from the Beach Boys to the Manson Family.

Shown in full recently at an exhibition at Marlborough Chelsea, New York, Paradies Amerika is a multi-tonal mash up of the artist’s five-screen video installation plotting a scattered and paranoid narrative of California's influence on our age. Heitzler is concerned with how information and misinformation contributes to Hollywood’s incongruent cultural histories, shedding light on the route via which visions of popular culture enter the collective consciousness. 

“What’s interesting with the internet is that there’s no vetting of information,” notes the California-based artist. “And the great thing about conspiracy theorists is that they’re really great researchers. Their conclusions are big leaps that undermine the quality of the research, but if you follow up like ‘I wonder if that really happened?’ you often find out that it did.”

Heitzler’s found footage of the retro clay character Gumby playing the piano spiralled into another inspiration point: he hired a composer, took the vignette and meticulously reedited it so that Gumby instead plays a 45-minute musical history piano concerto. “He starts with Schoenberg and into this Odd Future song,” says the artist. "Then moves into jazz, Coltrane, a version of 'Cinnamon Girl' that Neil Young plays on the piano, and a Black Flag song that I adapted."