The following video works are collections of durational field recordings and vignettes that serve to supplement my ongoing research and study of the changing California landscape. These field notes are intended to stand along side of still photographic projects that peer into the heart of the physical transformation and public and private engagement with the land here in the greater Los Angeles, the Southern Central Valley, the Eastern Sierras, and the Mojave Desert.
Cars and Trucks Among the Water Trails of the Ceriso, for example, is a time based meditation on found animal and automotive paths that have been forged in the direction of various water sources within certain remote areas of the Mojave Desert in California. This audiovisual assembly of vignettes serve as field that loosely follow Mary Hunter Austin’s central writings about arid California and its socioeconomic climates, meteorological parameters, and converging atmospheres. In this series of image and sound, the slow flow of water, the steady sounds of the open highway, and the pedestrian routes created by a spectrum of animal life in the region converge into an aggregate of migration.
Notes From the Edge of Center is a document of the western edge of California’s Central Valley, and Phragmites Communis and California Oak is a document of the Carrizo Plain region. Both examine small, poetic aspects of landscape, infrastructure, and wildlife at the edge of California’s Central Valley, where oil and agricultural production begin to interface and overlap.