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• Opening reception
for the exhibit: Saturday, April 10 at 7-10pm.
• As
part of the exhibit, the CLUI conducted a two day bus tour
Sat, April 24 - Sun, April 25.
View photographs from the tour [ > ]
• A new guidebook
of the area will be published by the CLUI in association
with Kazys Varnelis.
The Owens Valley, 200 miles north of Los
Angeles, has often been considered a back space of California,
and shadow of the urban southland. From the preparation for
the first aqueduct a hundred years ago to the
recreational urban tourists of today, the Owens Valley has
been an extension of the city, a fact physically asserted on
the ground, as more than 95% of the private land in the valley
is owned by the Los Angeles
Department of Water and Power.
Traveling up the narrow Valley, with its ten
thousand foot walls, we
follow the cyborg river that is channeled, artificially enhanced,
and ducted to serve as the drinking water supply for more than
half of the citizens of the City of Los Angeles. We follow
two major power lines that bring
electricity to the city. We follow a highway connecting the
Mammoth ski
resort to the skiers, fishermen to their fish, and bottled
water to its market.
In this away place, we see the effects of the
cause of Los Angeles, and by extrapolation, the codependent
relationship between the urban and rural, the consumers and
the consumed. The local and remote are two sides of the same
coin. This exhibit depicts some contemporary projects that
explore and examine Owens Valley as a place and a nonplace,
with its diversions and displacements of resources and peoples.
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