Interstate 5 appears on the map of California as a straight line connecting north and south. Although it traverses the western edge of one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world, the experience of driving the I-5 is typically one of emptiness. For drivers traveling between northern California cities and Los Angeles, the Central Valley landscape may be perceived as a kind of void, to be crossed as quickly as possible. Of course it is the by-design circumvention of local communities and the perceptual mechanics of freeway travel that make such an experience of landscape possible. One can still leave the freeway and discover, as everywhere, real places inhabited by real people and other living things. But the emptiness one can experience along the I-5 is also there, also real, for this is a landscape that has been reduced and simplified, as if to resemble a map of itself. In this series I seek to explore that reduction, the simplified geometries and abstracted forms of fields and orchards, power lines and aqueducts, roads and bridges and the freeway itself—the linear infrastructure of an unsustainable economy.
