Remnants of Dominion

At night, walking the streets of my Northern California neighborhood, I encounter remnants of modernist ideals, relic forms of mid-century landscaping - plant life cultivated and shaped to fit the lines of the built environment. I find traces here, microcosmic enactments of the Anthropocene - the urge to control and to shape nature for ornamental needs and to bring order to landscapes where wildness might otherwise prevail. I observe the constant cutting of this plant life by homeowner-gardeners, landscaping contractors and Latino day laborers, engaged in a kind of perpetual struggle for the creation of order over verdant chaos. Walking with my camera at night, firing a flash into front gardens to render the details of these alterations visible, I take on a self-assigned role of investigative, forensic photographer, compiling a visual dossier, gathering evidence, of a time and a place, details of the ongoing intent of homeowners and a culture to domesticate nature. If nothing else, this is a personal record, a subjective response to a culture of order, the development of a homogenized suburban ecology, and neighborhood conformity. In an attempt to document my local neighborhood, I explore how the past might manifest in the space of the present, and how it might intersect with questions around land, property, ownership, and dominion. While living in present time and space, we occupy places, yet these same places also have the capacity to occupy us, to reveal indelible and visible traces of history, precedents, and inherited ideals.

Drew Waters' work takes us right into a web of questions that touch our way of being in the world and shake the foundations of our social behavior, at least of a relevant part of the world. The series "Contra Costa" questions the control and dominion over the planet filtered through images of an ordinary suburb. The viewer observes a mental sprawl, an anonymous condition that often distinguishes American suburbia. The night vision reduced to black and white dramatizes the details of a miniature landscape that reveals a therapeutic fury over the forces of nature. Perverse geometries, a perfectionist craving, a topiary competition that borders paranoia. Where does all this come from? What thoughts brought us here? What past traumas does the apparent quietness hide? Nature is obedient and subservient to our will and hobbies; is this a true illusion rather than a great enlightenment? Everything turned into goods, from hedges to the workers that cut the grass. Although these plants support our diorama, the human comedy staged on a flowerbed, they don't need us. They were there before and will probably be there after precisely because they don't think like us. They speak together. We talk alone. We think of us as individuals. Plants do not exist as totems on a lawn that resembles a green carpet. They are there because we put them. And they reflect our loneliness. Our survival is restless because it lacks generosity and is forced into fences.