(Temporary) Homes for America Works
2021–

The works in this series are photographs of RVs (recreational vehicles) and mobile homes that are decaying on the streets of Los Angeles, photographed in a blunt straightforward manner, betraying no evidence of life except in the objects’ deterioration and their occupants’ improvised repairs. The residents are absent from the images, in much the same way they are absent from consideration by the city, its policymakers, and industries that choose not to take responsibility for their predicament. The corporate fascination with ‘flexible labor’ leaves these people stuck.

The works come out of the charged idea of homeownership in the American mythology. The first “recreational vehicles” (RVs) gained popularity in the U.S. in the mid-fifties. They were essentially industrially produced homes perched on the chassis of American-made trucks, and they were marketed as a democratization of American exploration, the idea that any family could, on short trips or family vacations, impersonate the homesteaders of American lore, and do so with all the conveniences of home. As this pursuit fell out of fashion, increasingly relegated to retirees, RVs, particularly the faded secondhand ones that have begun to grow in clusters in the suffering neighborhoods of post-industrial U.S. cities, indicate not a sense of personal exploration, but the impermanence and insecurity the American working poor must grapple with. These decaying corrugated metal containers perched atop aged semi-functional powertrains accumulate in the back allies of working-class neighborhoods in otherwise prosperous cities like unattended piles of autumn leaves; skeletal traces of previous life, and the canceled promise of a secure living wage, blue-collar jobs, and the social mobility the city once guaranteed. They, like the working poor they house, seem under constant threat of simply being blown away by a sudden change in air currents, whether by a shift in the municipal enforcement of vagrancy laws, which is a constant threat that sometimes makes these improvised neighborhoods disappear overnight, or the disintegration of the homes themselves into piles of detritus. Many are integrated with the mounds of debris that line the streets, abutting makeshift enclosures comprised of discarded shipping pallets, tarps, plywood, sheet metal, and various other industrial effluvia local businesses leave on curbs in the dark of the night to avoid the costs of sanctioned disposal. It is watching the American home dissolve slowly into its constituent parts, reduced to remnants and raw materials, their facades still emblazoned with the cavalier ideals these vehicles once represented, ‘Commander’, ‘Pinnacle’, ‘Voyager’ and so on. They are exemplary of the post-war economic boom of the U.S. and the ‘American dream’ it wrapped itself in, the promise of homeownership democratized and industrialized, and later made mobile, brought to a rusty, squeaking halt in the once bustling arteries of industrial might (these particular homes are located on the now derelict Union Pacific Avenue, named for the once powerful rail line whose main Los Angeles base of operations was located there). It bears mentioning that these works quite consciously take their form from art’s forays into the urban milieu, from Atget’s images of old Paris to Walker Evans’s “Homes for Americans,” Ed Ruscha’s various book treatments of the American architectural vernacular (such as his “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” and “Real Estate Opportunities”), Dan Graham’s “Homes for America,” and Lewis Baltz’s “New Industrial Parks of Irvine California” to name a few.

Titling Convention:

The date attributed to the work is the year of its first exhibition. A final description of the work, for example one that would appear on a wall didactic in an exhibition space, might read:

(Temporary) Homes for America: 3300 block to 4400 block, Union Pacific Avenue, between South Grande Vista Avenue and South Marianna Avenue, Los Angeles/Commerce, California, December 2020
2021
Black and white fiber print
11 x 15 inches

Here annotated:
(Temporary) Homes for America: 3300 block to 4400 block, Union Pacific Avenue, between South Grande Vista Avenue and South Marianna Avenue, Los Angeles/Commerce, California [place and location of photograph], December 2020 [month and year of photograph]
2021 [date of first exhibition]
Black and white fiber print [media]
11 x 15 inches [framed dimensions]