Submission

Most recently my eye has trained on the Santa Maria Regional Landfill in central California. I’m intrigued by the visual and conceptual dissonances that present themselves in this traumatic landscape: the perfect, iconic forms of the commercially grown produce; the carefully organized chaos of waste intake sites; the ever-changing engineered hills of the capped landfill cells, where wildflowers have returned to grow. Nestled among these contrasts are the hulking forms of baled and stacked tonnage of agricultural plastic, alternately resembling massive boulders or fortified walls, comprised of the same material that is used for insulation and irrigation in the tidy rows of strawberry fields nearby.