"Like a Murder of Crows, a Haunting of Architecture."
Since the housing crash of 2008 I have been obsessively photographing the apartment landscapes of Los Angeles. Like restless ocean waves made of buildings, these vistas appear, disappear, lay calm, and reappear in ever-new configurations. The churning is endless, ebbing and flowing with the economic cycles. These structures seem to drift on the horizon of memory, rising and falling with the labor of an untold numbers of workers and planners and schemers.
The collages that make up the core of this show are photographs of wavering buildings that are enlarged using an architectural plan photocopier. These images are then attached to wood framed cubes, which are collapsed back to two dimensions and reworked with industrial housing paint.
The photographs are a selection of images from The Apartment Homes Fake Book, a project based on the history of bootlegged jazz sheet music, remixing my own archive of images (published by Orenda Records in late 2015). In this flurry of paper, ink, paint, plywood, and toner I’m not sure if I found a way to bridge the vast chasm of history, but some small thread of catharsis emerged, pointing at the disjointed, but richly layered present.
