I shy from cliches, especially activities seemingly over-selfied on Instagram or social media. The Antelope Valley desert bloom attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors to this landscape about an hour outside of Los Angeles. Dozens of species of native plants carpet the mountains, foothills and fields in their spring bloom of yellow gold, orange, blue and purple for hundreds of square miles. I finally went to see it this season, as it was an occasion to escape the city and the doldrums of COVID lockdown. I wasn’t disappointed to witness nature’s power to inspire awe. The piece, ‘Desert Bloom - Gold Rush’, started with wanting to use the photos from the visit somehow, and evolve my interest in Mayan glyphs.
I learned the Antelope Valley was much a part of the gold rush history with the Kern River as an important prospect mining site. Immigrants from all over tried to stake their claim and work the land in search of riches. Among them were Native Americans, Mexicans, South Americans, Chinese, colonists and pioneers driven to the west coast. Indigenous tribes, the Spanish Empire, the United States of Mexico and the expanding American colonies have vied to control or own this land, in the pre-statehood era of California. Impressions of many distinct peoples and cultures that lived the land, and the native plants, the poppies flourishing here for eons more, made me think about ideas of permanence, and the greater force of change, flux.
These thoughts emerged in images used in the piece. Among the layers of collage of discarded newsprint, magazines and posters, I integrated photo transfers of the blooming poppy landscape with other symbols: the Chinese symbol for land, carved and torn into the side of the composition, a carved out map portion fo the Kern river, drip painted in gold, and graffiti inspired text of the word ‘native’, cut and ripped in areas at the bottom left. Paint, plaster and pencil are used to blur edges of images between layers.
I wanted the piece to have a haphazard look, like some of the abandoned billboards or dilapidated city walls I’ve come across. I was hoping to generate some renewed tension and conceptual possibilities in a loose composition of imagery, emulating somewhat these mayan glyphs, creating new meaning in multiple juxtapositions of pictograms. I could see a web of ideas and imagery all related to the landscape, implicating time, old and new, cultures, people, all connected through unrelenting mutability. I feel like I’m wandering the ancient landscape again, as well as the landscape of ideas.