Parking, Lots

Video Installation, 2024

Press play here to begin

This piece engages with the past, present, and future environmental effects of urbanization on Los Angeles’s natural watershed, the region's most valuable and recognizable resource.

Through archival footage, exploratory shoots, and performance, Parking, Lots reckons with the clash between the historical idealized myth of west-coast living that reverberated from Southern California’s beaches and the reality of living in contemporary concrete Los Angeles.

Finally, in musing about the future, this work explores what resources we value the most and therefore protect. As the climate becomes increasingly uninhabitable, how will the natural human drive to find comfort and create culture cultivate resurgence in our increasingly uncomfortable future?

Then

Part one of three.

Now

Part two of three.

Soon

Part three of three.

Parking, Lots is currently on view in the Pitzer Kallick Gallery until February 1st, 2025.

While this page cannot mimic the gallery viewing experience, I hope to share some details of the original installation to enhance the work.

Viewers are invited to enter the room which features an ambient soundscape of urban Los Angeles playing out loud, see above, each piece is mounted on a monitor on its own wall.

Each video is viewed individually and by one person at a time with headphones on, while participants intermittently re-enter the soundscape to move between each video. Each clip loops repetitively in the gallery space, for the sake of convenience that effect is not mimicked here.

Special thanks to Tjaard Van Loben Sels, original song. Archival sourced from Howard Wexler, Universal Pictures, British Pathe, Getty Images, WBNS10TV, Kinolibrary, Periscope, LLC, Frontman Media, The Beach Boys, Cal Fire Museum, National Building Museum, G Cast