One Pool, Los Angeles
This project was on one pool in Los Angeles. I photographed it for two years. The series examines reflections on the pool as the light changed across days and seasons. The series is about illusion.
LA-specific details locate the images. There are saturated tropical colors, a lush garden, palm trees. There is seediness mixed with the decadence of the pool. There is hard light that leaves some images shimmering or in sharp detail.
Like many people at that time, I was dislocated. I was a temporary transplant to Los Angeles. In that city, I felt like an alien who had landed in a mirage. The pool became my LA mirage.
Many images show a deceptively subterranean world. Brilliant color fields and shapes are dreamy abstractions that can appear multidimensional. But they are mysterious, almost hallucinatory, and leave me uncertain where I am in space.
Some images brim with vitality and sensual energy. Yet pulling the camera back, they are confined by walls. Beauty is a fantasy thread that runs through, and it is pleasurable. It is also transient. It is all fantasy, what appears is not what is.
Getting lost in that project was a respite. They are lovely, ephemeral and shape shifting, and I embraced it. The photographs, to me, are symbolic of my experience of that time in Los Angeles.