Archive Post-Landscape: Between Nature and Culture

Curator's Essay | Images from the Exhibition | Kim Abeles Sandow Birk | Laurie Brown | Elizabeth Bryant The Center for Land Use Interpretation | Wanda Hammerbeck Andreas Hessing | Sant Khalsa | Skeet McAuley Kathryn Miller | Diana Thater | Post-Landscape Home Page Archive - Fall 2001 Home

Laurie Brown

Growing up in Los Angeles, my brother and I always looked forward to the weekends, a time when our grandfather would often take us hiking and exploring in the nearby mountains and deserts. Many years later I am still drawn to the outdoors, where I now find myself pointing my camera lens toward the changing landscape close to my home near the Southern California coast, a geography where the boundary line between built and un-built is constantly being redrawn. Here on the edge of the West, on the very land that was once considered to be our wilderness frontier, the expanding suburbs continue to create new footprints on our maps and new horizons in our view. The use of a panoramic camera emphasizes the line of the horizon and the expanse of the view, often situating us as if from a great distance, at the planet’s edge. The camera captures the reality of a specific time and place, but the resulting photograph can at the same time allude to larger realities. The exposed layers of earth often speak of earlier cultures as studied in archeology or even of geologic time, a time before the human presence. These many ordered spaces reflect my continued interest in considering the reality of my own cultural time and place as well as the reality of its connections to our larger sense of history and the possibilities of both the mythic and the timeless.