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

Andreas Hessing

My work has its roots deep in childhood interests and the southern California landscape; from countless hours spent exploring hills, fields, and orchards and from childhood worlds created of toys, utilitarian objects, and suburban architecture.

Broadly, I am looking at land use. Specifically, I am interested in the philosophical, political, and social implications of our indigenous flora.

Transect is intended to be an exploration of the tension between our burgeoning human population and the pressures it puts on wild habitat—specifically the loss of coastal sage scrub/chapparal habitat in southern California. These habitat types, like their counterparts in other Mediterranean climates around the world, are the primary areas for development. The continued loss of these wild areas is simply a continuation of the process of colonization. When people move into new areas they intentionally and unintentionally bring the plants, animals, and ideas with which they are familiar.

The plants we see everyday in private yards and public spaces are almost exclusively horticultural imports—exotics. Many of them, lawns in particular, require enormous amounts of imported chemicals, soils, water, and energy to survive in our climate. These practices create dangerous imbalances in knowledge, ecosystems, and pocketbooks. I once found these gardens “normal,” as they evoked feelings of comfort and security. But upon reflection I realized these feelings were also imported. Plants are the center of the web of life. When we pull up plants, dynamite trees, or bulldoze the earth we are destroying homes, food, and cultures. When plants lose their lives, pollinators and dispersers perish, soil chemistry changes, and millions of years of evolution ceases in that area. Specific types of flora and fauna evolve and live in certain areas for concrete reasons.

People are one important part of the universe but not the most important. Like everything else we need to live in harmony with the rest of our peers.