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COLLATERAL DAMAGE, 2022-24

These works explore the current shape of California’s coastline with drawings on plexiglass that expose industry adulterating an otherwise bucolic landscape.

Initially, these works were inspired by the hair-raising twin tsunami test sirens I overheard while gallery-sitting at a gallery in Newport Beach, CA. My drive home along Pacific Coast Highway became a study in the collateral damage a tsunami would create along the low-lying highway. Not just land swallowed up. Not just houses. Further up the highway are impressive desalination plants, aging electrical plants, and fixed and mobile oil derricks sitting right on the beach. All the infrastructure is right in the path of my imagined disaster.

I started marveling at the fragility of our situation, the interplay of natural phenomena and man-made structures. In Southern California we continually challenge nature and attempt to evolve our relationship with our environment. Fires, floods, earthquakes, droughts. How much can we improve our safety and the natural world…without actually leaving?

 

In these works, I am exploring this complex relationship: the stubborn refusal to quit trying to live here in the face of an all-powerful and capricious mother nature. These drawings, done on discarded plexiglass with sharpie markers, are the result of a forensic study of past flood and fire zones, earthquake fault lines, global warming projections, and conspiracy theories. Mark-making from these maps intersect with imagery of local current, abandoned or reclaimed infrastructure.

 

Initially these works started simply as plein air studies, utilizing the scratched-up plexiglass as a view finder and sighting tool. As I worked, I started overlaying with the landscaped and industrial imagery. Over time this imagery has evolved, building layers of drawing on both the front and back of the plexiglass, building density and shadow into the final works.

 

Formal elements of drawing are used as ways of describing chaos and multiplicity of time. Object scale varies. Perspective rules are misused. Horizon lines are deliberately misaligned. Line work deliberately blurs and links organic and architectural elements together.

Using discarded and basically indestructible wasted plexiglass seemed to not only function as a wonderful drawing surface and viewfinder but seemed to fit in with the notion of reclaiming a wasted product…an attempting to recycle. Because I wanted the immediacy of a drawn gesture and precision of mapping, drawing made sense. The sharpies also offer a kind-of low-brow permanence, potentially, eventually, fading in the sunshine over time.

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© 2024-25 Katie Elizabeth Stubblefield

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