Hello Nina, Decided to check up on you... Seems like your life is moving along nicely! I'm very glad fer that. Anywho, I thought I'd take a look at what you're doing/painting 'cause I was reminded of your latest renderings of industrial landscapes when I was browsing through the USC geography dept's homepage and found an archive of photos of the urban landscape of L.A.... Thus, a coincidence that you were headed out there as of your last entry.
The archive images of businesses- from pawnshops to rehab clinics, indoor mercados to automobile scrap shops- old, broke-down urban industries, 12 lane freeways flowing through the bottoms of coastal canyons, skid row cardboard box neighborhoods, and murals galore trying to add some color and social commentary to bleak, blank unimaginative building sides, made me shudder, for reasons that are hard to put into words. How to wrap one's mind around such phenomena, I'm not too sure... but seems like your paintings are a pretty cool meditation on the very vile, very poisonous industrial side of our over-developed homeland. We need to keep on trying to understand it, cause there's more to it all than we can see... I'm off in Norway still, freshly, as of 2 weeks, back from Nepal. Was doing fieldwork on local perceptions of water scarcity- the effect of the global phenomena of climate change- in some Tibetan villages behind that great Himalayan massif, the Annapurna Range. It was pretty wild, and I'm still reeling from it. Well, I hope your sojourn into the heart of L.A. proves... trippy. Hope to hear of it! Hasta luego, -Armando
1 comment:
Hello Nina,
Decided to check up on you... Seems like your life is moving along nicely! I'm very glad fer that. Anywho, I thought I'd take a look at what you're doing/painting 'cause I was reminded of your latest renderings of industrial landscapes when I was browsing through the USC geography dept's homepage and found an archive of photos of the urban landscape of L.A.... Thus, a coincidence that you were headed out there as of your last entry.
The archive images of businesses- from pawnshops to rehab clinics, indoor mercados to automobile scrap shops- old, broke-down urban industries, 12 lane freeways flowing through the bottoms of coastal canyons, skid row cardboard box neighborhoods, and murals galore trying to add some color and social commentary to bleak, blank unimaginative building sides, made me shudder, for reasons that are hard to put into words. How to wrap one's mind around such phenomena, I'm not too sure... but seems like your paintings are a pretty cool meditation on the very vile, very poisonous industrial side of our over-developed homeland. We need to keep on trying to understand it, cause there's more to it all than we can see...
I'm off in Norway still, freshly, as of 2 weeks, back from Nepal. Was doing fieldwork on local perceptions of water scarcity- the effect of the global phenomena of climate change- in some Tibetan villages behind that great Himalayan massif, the Annapurna Range. It was pretty wild, and I'm still reeling from it.
Well, I hope your sojourn into the heart of L.A. proves... trippy. Hope to hear of it!
Hasta luego,
-Armando
Post a Comment