Eaton Canyon, 2023-2024
Acrylic paint on concrete. A series of paintings exploring the border between Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument.
RESOURCES: Conserving raw materials by increasing time spent per square foot of artwork will limit production and consumption. Painted on concrete because the body of Los Angeles has concrete veins. Eaton Canyon exists on the border between urban Los Angeles and wilderness (San Gabriel Mountains National Monument).
PHYSICAL BONDS: These paintings flow out of my weekly ritual, since December 2021 - running the trail to the waterfall and back. These paintings depict locations along the two mile long trail. I have attempted to connect my body and that particular landscape, and infuse that embodied experience and energy into the work.
MARK MAKING: The essence of art is to make a mark, and these fall in the lineage of etching one's perceived mortality onto stone and surface. I understand this landscape is the ancestral home of the Tongva, before colonization and forced displacement. I am aware of my/our own impending erasure from this land. Eaton Canyon is on the edge of the first land back initiative in Los Angeles: www.tongva.land
RITUAL: Exercise and mark making as a meditative discipline. I call it a ritual of engagement, because there is a commitment, sense of belonging, and pilgrimage.
SIGNPOSTS: The artworks are fully realized when they are anchored as signposts along the trail. The paintings depict the look of the landscape at a particular point in time, and the landscape would slowly change around it. That scenario not being possible, the paintings exist in a state of dislocation.
SIGNS OF WHAT IS TO COME: The paintings point toward a new body of work that will take me deeper up into the canyon, exploring the literal and metaphysical wilds of earth, cosmos, and self.
EXTRACTION: The shape of the concrete surfaces look like sacred architecture, but also sections of sidewalk. They feel as if they were extracted - cut out - of the landscape itself. Nature is the most universal sense of the sacred that exists, and from that perspective, these paintings are relics.