Themes of development as a self-generating, self-replicating force that exists outside of nature are encoded in this series of photographs, which view Los Angeles as both a specific site and as a more generalized condition. The inversion of tonalities in these works is a simple act that defamiliarizes the images. It also subtly refers to other ways of imaging – like the X-ray, which sees within the structure of an organism or body – or other modes of seeing like the flickering negative images in an atomic blast, when the shadow world is revealed and released.
The aerial images in Oblivion describe a potentially desecrated urban fabric, even as they transcribe the commonplace; they cannot help but serve as portent of some future conflagration. Indeed, chaos and catastrophe today seem implicit in the urban aerial view. To survey the city from the air can be considered to nearly approach an act of civil disobedience.
Left to navigate this terrain of anxiety and estrangement, the citizens of this landscape may begin to ponder some of the elemental design questions of our time: Where is home? Where is our safe haven? How can we move towards such a place? Perhaps by forming such questions, we can begin to imagine the process of creating their answers. DM
