“I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original”
This quote by architectural critic and writer Reyner Banham sums up my curiosity about the interesting complexity, circumstance, questions and concerns with the puzzling built landscape in Los Angeles. His attempt to read the mysterious labyrinth of urban navigation without translation points to a desire for a more native understanding of the nuances, subtleties, impressions and images as well as the real structures, surfaces, textures, and cultural activities.
My work addresses what happens in the space of a moment, between what one sees, what might appear to some as a most common fact of life in LA, but just beneath those assumptions about traffic, congestion and the experience of driving is alternative evidence of an environmental setting that invites a paradoxical consideration of time and space in a compelling visual context.
Roads no longer merely lead to places; they are places.
J.B Jackson
Jackson’s quote introduces a new perspective for contemplating contemporary landscape and while traditional views used to be about destination, my work looks at the parts of journey itself as place, with an invitation to be more conscious of the changing and unchanging surroundings. These images made while commuting articulate many of the classical conventional landscape ideas into my own world of searching for meaning in new space and a discovery of new places.
