parched

Ian Baguskas, Two Structures, Death Valley, California, 2007 30x38.3" C-print

Jen Bekman sends word that Sweet Water, an exhibition of new work by photographer Ian Baguskas, opens tomorrow evening at her Spring Street gallery. Baguskas's images are full of bleak, bleached out light and represent failed utopias in the landscape—moments where all the spry optimism of modern America just gives up the ghost. The photographs resonate with current economic fears, and realities—manifested in tent cities outside of LA (Thanks, Kazys). Our own contemporary aspirations gone tragically wrong.

From the press release:

Sweet Water presents us with striking images of vast land and open skies, lying in contrast to artificial, isolated structures, portraying a landscape fractured by modern aspirations’ collisions with the formidable, often unbeatable powers of nature. While journeying from one end of California to the other, Baguskas documented the remains of human attempts to transform untamable landscapes into personal utopias. The resulting images are at once archaeological, anthropological and aesthetically beautiful.

The show runs through April 26.

Rincon Artificial Island and Pipeline, Ventura, California, 2007 40x51" C-print


Luxury Homes, Provo, Utah, 2006. 30x38" Chromira C-print

Comments

[Kenneth Kambara]

This spring, I took an impromptu trip to Death Valley. I saw these towns just hanging on like Argus. Abandoned buildings without roofs, downwind of a chemical extraction plant feeding off the salts of a dry lake bed. I saw houses stripped of everything of value...siding, copper wire, etc. with a bleached landscape as a backdrop.

Around 29 Palms {near Joshuas Tree} there are a bunch of abandoned homesteads in the high-desert. Although increasingly vandalized, some still are time capsules representing unsustainable settlement.