Heaven: The Los Angeles River

Alfred Stieglitz's photograph "Hand of Man" from 1902 depicts black smoke emerging from a train's steam stack, symbolizing the arrival of the U.S. industrial age and the significant change it brought from the previous agrarian era. The smoke from that train was followed by the Western expansion, mechanization, and the desire to control the forces of nature.

The Channelization of the LA River serves as a glaring example of how destructive industrialization can be. In their pursuit to solve a perceived flooding issue, civil engineers have obliterated the natural beauty and disrupted the living ecosystem, leaving behind a scar on the landscape.

Ironically, there is beauty in this concrete corset. The concrete takes on the river’s organic shapes, which I extensively showed in my earlier LA River X takeover. In this current body of work, I am looking at the river as a mirror reflecting the concrete and the electrical power lines in counterpoint to the water in the river & the clouds in the sky, I am also widening the lens on adjacent areas that represent the 20th century’s narrow vision of problem-solving.