The City Against Itself, 2014.
The City Against Itself, single channel video, 00:12:42, 2014.
The City Against Itself inspects the contradictions of the City of San Diego: a city self-marketed as a paradisiacal escape, a heaven-on-earth home to numerous religious and scientific organizations claiming a direct connection to the heavens. The City Against Itself forms a particular condensation of the City of San Diego, whose builders and boosters effectively attracted the multitude of migrant hopefuls across the continent to their desert land of plenty providing the newcomer with an eden embroiled in conflicts with labor, poverty, and, as noted by Edmund Wilson in ‘The Jumping Off Place”, a conspicuous nation leading suicide rate. Responding in part to the widely dispersed image of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue’s California Building, centerpiece of the Panama California Exposition–past and present sell-point for the city and icon of both aspirant longing and chimerical elsewhere–The City Against Itself looks at the privileging of fantastically non-urban space in the development of the city and seeks to question what can be learned from San Diego and the politics of its ideology of escape; moving from the terrestrial to the extraterrestrial.
The City Against Itself w/ Idiot Sun, installation at San Diego Art Institute, 2015.
SCREENINGS:
URB ’14
Kiasma Museum
Helsinki, Finland
8.9.2014
Helsinki Falling Apart
Liisankatu 19/ AV-Arkki
Helsinki, Finland
9.18.2014
San Diego Keeps Her Promise
San Diego Art Institute
San Diego, CA USA
1.23.2015 – 2.27.2015
Aarhus Center for Visual Art
Aarhus, Denmark
6.26.2015
Six Degrees of San Diego: CULTS
San Diego Art Institute
San Diego, CA USA
3.23.2017
