“Scratch the surface a little and the desert shows through” — Bertold Brecht (Journals)
Mark Ruwedel’s third solo exhibition with the gallery develops from his on-going project Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies. For over two decades, Ruwedel has photographed American deserts and wild spaces that bear traces of human intervention.
In this series, Ruwedel turns his attention to an area culturally known as the Inland Empire: a semi-arid zone between the Mediterranean climate of America’s coastal regions and the harsher one of the deserts to the east.
Before European colonisation, Southern California was, to a great extent, tree-less. The three trees that characterize the region, eucalyptus, palm and citrus, are all imports. Ruwedel focuses on these non-native trees and their influence on the landscape.
