The Steelhead and the Beaver.

 

The LA River is part of the city’s identity and history. It travels from the Los Angeles mountains for 51 miles through multiple communities, downstream to Long Beach, but still many 

Angelenos are unaware of its existence. 

 

I make work about the river; my dream is of returning to a natural alluvial river and to encourage the return of lost species. The goal of this exhibition is to draw attention to the LA River at a time when considerable State and Federal funds have been provided for its restoration. 

 

The state government has established a working group, the LA River Master Plan, to redesign and construct a more sympathetic waterway. Our concern is that developers and corporate interests will have an unbalanced influence on the river’s development. Don’t hide the waterway under the Master Plan’s elevated platform parks, as the current scheme proposes - a concept opposed by FOLAR and other community-based environmental organizations.

 

In 1938, the LA River became a concreted waste water system.

Today, much of the river still remains featureless, canalised, precluded from public access; the Master Plan is to send a section of our river out of sight both for humans and the native flora and fauna. With increasing concern for the climate crisis and damage to the environment, it is essential to take a stronger ecological, holistic view of the river’s future, and consider a hydrologic and hydraulic regime that reconnects the river to historic floodplains and tributaries. Restore our river as a natural river – rewilded, not gentrified and overdeveloped.