Strike/Slip

 

Paintings with digital prints

installation 2004

all paintings : oil, graphite, pigment on plywood doors 80x24 inches

all digital prints: C prints lightjet 80x37.5 inches

 

 

Carrizo Plain in central coast California is a "luxuriant" showcase for strike-slip faulting typical of the San Andreas Fault. Recently there were two 6.0 or higher quakes on or near the fault -- the San Simeon quake of December 22, 2003, and the Parkfield quake, of September 28, 2004. Strike/Slip is an experiential study of the Carrizo Plain as a disappearing or invisible architecture of strike/slip fault action.

Strike/slip topologies turn up as offsets, streambeds running to (apparently) nowhere, or strange ‘beheaded’ channels where the fault activity has diverted a drainage. These run, at Carrizo, to Soda Lake, whose color and consistency of salt and grey silt makes me want a large schema for the sense of Soda Lake, as caught in the act of disappearance, while persisting in its continuous white self, like a veil without a bride.

 

 

 

Here are two interlocking ‘offsets’ in related media of digital print and painting. Miming geologic waveforms and motion maps, paintings in graphite dust on white and grey paint purport to describe a potential action of strike/slip without fixing a place or time. They desire a mathematical mood, as if to trace a potential threat or promise of quake, like a probability function that may or may not predict tectonic shifts and shocks to the system.

They occlude or shadow a suite of linked ‘documentary’ images. These are large scale digital print montages based on onsite documentary photography at Carrizo Plains during periods just after and just before magnitude 6 activity. The paintings are the (function) strikes and the photographs are the (set of possible) slips, thus an imaginary mathematics of landscape as risk: [strike]/slip.

The paired groups are in hot and cool media, the former as scrappy raw paintings on contractor doors, the latter digitally finessed into C prints on glossy photographic paper. The paintings are tied to no-time or any-time while the photographs seek and fail to establish a stable turf, and are place/no-place.

Between them is what may not be fully seen but can certainly be felt. The work speculates on Smithson’s “nonsite” aesthetic as a place of aftershock and the disappeared.