Channel, the project from which this folio is drawn, considers the site of the Los Angeles River, describing a place where nature has become preternatural. The natural river is a cyclical body of water, surging with snowmelt and late-winter rain, that forms in the San Fernando Valley. Its alluvial plain shaped the land over which Los Angeles now sprawls. Its counterpart is a concrete river built by engineers beginning in 1938 after a series of devastating floods. The flowing river is perennial and elemental, charting geological time. The constructed river is vulnerable and finite, a fossil of the future.
Created to harness and control the unpredictable swell of floodwater, the fifty-one-mile-long waterway plays this role for a few days each year. The rest of the time, it is a site of unintended use, an interchangeably Edenic and apocalyptic landscape that leaves room for projection and fantasy. Recent revitalization efforts have rewilded some stretches of the channel, excavating a permeable bottom in an attempt to bring forth the river’s underlying forms. In other stretches, just a few miles away from those picturesque views, the concrete is riddled with oozing drain holes and fluorescent algae. Vibrant vines grow from fiberglass insulation that has fused with soil in shallow waters. Charred trees and run-down flood measures are reminders of forces beyond human control.
The project extends the initial act of speculation that was the building of the channel. What is unearthed by the human effort to shape the surface of the land? What is the fate of a new species of river—part geological, part engineered? Shifting point of view and scale, the photographs present a terrain cobbled together from ill-fitting parts. Color is acute or entirely absent. Light erases information and obscures orientation. Gravity misbehaves, and seasons are out of order. The dislocation of the viewer is both spatial and temporal.
How does one survive in this atomized reality? Abstraction gives way to fragments of identifiable infrastructures and objects, the remnants of us. But in this world, agency is granted to the landscape, not to the humans who pass through it undetected. The sculptural forms in the images are assemblages fashioned by the channel, the result of growth coupling with decay.
When imagining the paradigm-altering nature of the climate crisis, one needs to consider new criteria for visualization. What vocabularies are available for artists to represent a transformed ecological order that remains largely abstract but that is already our reality? This is where scientific data or description fail, and we are left with stories. Channel is a document of a human-built river, a science and a fiction, a place caught between a mythological past and a posthuman horizon, a case study for our time.
—Sasha Rudensky
