RED ALL NIGHTmare on 18th Street Exhibition

Horror cinema rarely ends up on a gallery wall, but RED ALL NIGHTmare on 18th Street makes a good case for it. The Los Angeles artist duo Beck+Col fill the Hearth Gallery at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica with seven inflatable portals, each one shaped like a monstrous forest creature. If you are mapping out things to do in Los Angeles this November, this is a free, offbeat stop on the Westside.

When: November 13 to December 18, 2026 Where: Hearth Gallery, 18th Street Arts Center, 1639 18th St, Santa Monica, CA 90404 Price: Free and open to the public

What the installation is

The show grows out of Red All Night, the second film in Beck+Col's Red Night horror trilogy. In the film, a group of monsters summons a villain called the Smile to drive the occupants out of a suburban house. The Smile is then lured into a supernatural forest, where the trees come alive as colorful, shape-shifting monsters who perform a ritual to steal its evil essence.

In the gallery, those forest creatures become sculpture. Their inflatable tentacles sprawl across the walls of the Hearth, and inside the mouth of each one a short clip from the film plays. You are looking into the movie's world through seven openings, one at a time.

The idea behind it

Beck+Col describe the Red Night trilogy as a question about individualism, the habit of putting the individual ahead of the collective. Each film borrows a different idea of horror as the unknown, drawing on the philosopher Eugene Thacker. The first film explored the world-for-us, and Red All Night turns to the world-without-us, widening the conflict from individual versus community to individual versus nature.

The duo has worked together since 2014 and has performed or shown at venues including the Hammer Museum, REDCAT and Angels Gate Cultural Center.

Visiting

The exhibition runs for just over five weeks, so there is plenty of time to fit it into a Westside afternoon. Admission is free, but check the 18th Street Arts Center site for gallery hours before you go, since the posted dates cover the whole run rather than daily opening times. The center sits on a quiet residential-industrial block of Santa Monica, a short drive from the Bergamot area, and the artist residency studios nearby are part of what makes the campus worth a look.

Browse more arts and culture picks on our arts and culture page, or see what else is going on around Santa Monica. For a broader look at upcoming events in Los Angeles, keep an eye on the site's event listings as the holidays approach.