I will be showing this work at the SWARM Gallery in Oakland, CA July 31 to September 12, 2010 .
The Los Angeles series: The Gardens of Los Angeles
Southern California has always resonated for me as a visual palette. It is a place where what is seen is more compelling than what is felt. It is shamelessly transparent, a vessel of broken dreams and promises, a cautionary tale at the end of the American road.
Greater Los Angeles county and all of the surrounding counties, indeed most of southern California is in service to the philosophy of urban sprawl, the “more is better” notion that is so Los Angeles and so American. Los Angeles shimmers with all the infirmities of many mega-cities. It is densely inhabited, broken, shapeless and tasteless.
It does not feel like it could ever really be like home. All of southern California as you approach it from the center of the state on the infamous Interstate 5 is an alien landscape. Only fifty years ago, a traveler might assume that a place of ecological and natural beauty lay ahead. Indeed as my family approached LA from the east on Route 66 in 1957, I remember that feeling. In time, those assumptions could only be realized by the nostalgic luxury of memory.
And so, I photograph there frequently and make pictures in the spirit of the place. Open vistas as far as the eye can see, urban detritus fades out to infinity. Empty streets and roads belie the real population density, but echo its persistence. The infrastructure that supports life in these great urban centers often articulates a surreal visual relationship between the man-made and the natural landscape. Beaches filled with people and cars but always at a distant point in the photograph, suggesting that mass determinates always trump individual ones.
As landscape photography takes on a more political burden and less of a metaphorical one, I consider in my work, contemporary issues of land use as it effects the greater good. Questions of unbridled development, ecological abuses and the myth of the American Dream all resonate for me in this work.
BILL MATTICK 2006