“California is a place … in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work out here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent”. ~Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

In Search of the Abundance of Light is about the darker side of paradise. During the four years I lived in Los Angeles, I became obsessed with palm trees. They are the ultimate symbol of the city: dreamy, tall, proud, resilient, exotic, promising glamour, endless sunshine and vacations, happiness, lightness, paradise on earth. Yet, though LA promises to be this sun-drenched, winterless paradise where dreams come true, there is darkness menacing at its heart, as there is perhaps in every promised paradise. All the dreams that never materialize, the propensity of the area to natural disasters, violence and upheaval, the sense that we are always on the verge of catastrophe, natural, social or personal, that everything is hanging by a thread. In Search of the Abundance of Light rests on this perpetual duality and tension.

I poured red alcohol inks on my black and white photographs of LA palm trees, using chance as a key component of the work. The stains damage the glossy surface of the print; paradise is no longer. The red, organic marks on my photographs are a way to inhabit a place that felt foreign and separate from me, to bring a sense of what feels as a necessary winter to the land of eternal summer and its winterless existence of ever perfect weather.