Reflections of the Los Angeles River
Reflections of the Los Angeles River
Artist's statement:
My immediate environment has always included heavily polluted waters.
Aa a child, sewage seepage pooled in the backyard when it rained and my bike trips were to the (bad parts) of the Ohio & Miami Rivers to take a dip where “just don’t drink it” was the only real heeded warning of the waters. Coming of age in Brooklyn, the notorious Superfund Site Gowanus Canal was my literal backyard, where the rains now flooded the front of my home with the rumored cholera of its murk. And as an adult I now reside mere blocks from the Los Angeles River, where I ignore signage warning of its toxicity during daily treks along its banks.
These waterways share a common thread: a Grand Plan of civic & commercial investment, detoxification, revitalization, and gentrification - a Grand Plan that both failed and was never realized in Cincinnati, a Grand Plan that drove me out of my Brooklyn art studio, and a Grand Plan in Los Angeles where it’s becoming evident I’ll be forced to relocate before its revitalization - i.e. a Grand Plan that eludes me.
This body of work represents both my reality and a deluded denial of it. In searching for the beauty and hope of the cleansed and revitalized river I've been promised, I'm faced only with the brutal reality of my current toxic landscape, left to fabricate hope & beauty with a device both metaphoric and literal: reflection.
All of these images were photographed during a daily walk of the Glendale Narrows portion of the LA River, between Fletcher Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard. While the integrity of the images remain true (they aren’t manipulated other than cropping, changing the orientation & mirroring), the images present an utterly false portrayal of their subject. Sometimes the river’s filth stares us in the face yet we take comfort in remaining blind to it, other times we’re sent on an internal search for meaning that transfers our attention away from the river altogether and into minds.
