2025: Dockweiler Beach, April 27, 2025
Ice cube sculpture made from collecting things washed up within a 100ft stretch of shore on Dockweiler Beach in Los Angeles, California, on April 27, 2025. In this photo, the sculpture is displayed on top of sand collected on the same day from the same stretch of beach.
2018: Pacific Ocean Pier (1958-1975)
I was drawn to this place because it “no longer exists.” What does it mean to exist in relation to time and remembrance? Does something still exist if you can describe it, visualize it, or physically represent it in the present? What other conditions codify existence in absentia?
Pacific Ocean Park opened on July 28th, 1958, and closed on October 6th, 1967. Between 1967 and 1974, the park slowly sank into the Pacific Ocean. In the winter of 1974-1975, the park was demolished.
I researched the coordinates of the park and created a map to use as a field reference. I went to the beach with my 35mm film camera and map to document my findings. I took photos of printouts of the rides and structures that were missing from the point of view of the printouts, holding the camera with one hand and the pictures with the other. I was thinking about how, as the photographer, I was the tether from 1975 to 2018.
My final field test to measure the absence of this location involved swimming with a disposable camera to check for the remnants of pylons. This place “no longer exists;” I felt the passage of time as I floated in its spatio-temporal shadow.
2015: Berlin Art Institute: Litfaßsäule (1989-2001)
I first encountered encapsulated time in the form of a forgotten advertisement column in East Berlin in 2015.
I removed the posters from the concrete column by repeating a single vertical cut to the structure for a day and a half. This cutting process resulted in the extrication of the freestanding paper column of advertisements, which measured just over ten feet tall.
This piece contained 26 years. (The earliest advertisement on the the sculpture predates the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the most recent advertisement on the sculpture is a movie poster for a film that was released in 2001).
I was interested in slowly revealing layers of encapsulated, condensed memory to the viewer. The column is displayed upside down to allow gravity and time to manipulate its form and to create a time-based installation.
