Group exhibition entitled Un-Privileged Views
WUHO Gallery, Woodbury University Gallery, LA
March 2012
Whenever we fly from or into major metropolitan centers, we are often compelled to stare out the window as the plane takes off or lands. Especially at night, these moments afford the passenger a spectacular overhead view of the city. From above, the city’s logic is at once decipherable, from the layout of the modern gridded city to the identifiable landmarks that pinpoint familiar places. Focusing on freeway interchanges, a clear landmark from high above not worthy of contemplation except during traffic jams, this project attempts to highlight the ubiquity of infrastructure regardless if you’re in North America or Asia. Car culture has, from the early part of the 20th C. to the present, come to represent a certain ‘image’ of prosperity and growth for the city and its inhabitants. The highway spaghetti that one passes through each day is a testament to not only a civil engineering wonder and urban planning triumph but also is the exaltation of what constitutes a modern city. The woven image here are two exemplary places in our psyche, the Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange in Los Angeles and the Puxi Viaduct Exchange in Shanghai – the former belonging to the rise and effects of the car’s influence on the city in the 20th C and the latter a symbol and ultimate reification of car ownership and rise to the middle class in the 21st C.