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Laguna Dolores
(Albion Street)
mixed media photo collage on board, 10”x8”
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When making art
about the passage of time, it might be necessary to let some time pass
yourself. This year, as I started
creating the pieces for this new series of Time
Travel Photos, I began to understand that my own process began decades
ago.
My story started
the summer I was nine years old. It was
when I saw sand dunes for the first time.
The moment of that experience of seeing dunes, in person, for the first
time, sticks with me decades later. It was
at a place called Sandy Neck that I would learn to love as a teenager. That vacation alongside a salt marsh was just
a glimpse of what was to come. In a few
years my family left the city and we moved to Cape Cod. We lived near the beach and next to a salt
marsh. That was the time when I really
began to appreciate nature and also learned the vital role that marshes play in
marine ecosystems.
Fast forward to
life in San Francisco. It is a city like
many cities, especially the coastal ones, where the natural environment was
radically altered to allow the city to grow.
Creeks and waterways were blocked, land was leveled and even hilltops
were removed. Marshes and tidal flats
were filled in to expand San Francisco out into the Bay. As I learned more about San Francisco’s
history, I learned about the hidden coast that was beneath the streets. I spent years working in offices in Jackson
Square and the base of Potrero Hill. Places
that are blocks from the shore but where, at one point in time, the high tide
reached the spots where the buildings now sit.
I was sitting
outside eating my lunch one day in 1998, I was near the old Trans Bay Terminal
and I had, for lack of a better word, a vision.
I started visualizing this busy spot between office buildings and what
it must have been like about 200 years back.
I thought about when the Spanish had just arrived and the place had
changed little since the Ohlone made it their home. I imagined a quiet place with the smell of
the tide, dense vegetation and wildlife.
I started to wonder about how I could turn this vision, this idea, into
art.
Then, in 2011, I
carried out a different type of project about time. The 2011 Project was one where I made a small,
four-inch square, piece of art each day for the entire year. The 365 pieces focused on different themes
and ideas and I experimented with a number of styles and mediums. The series was intended as both a time
capsule of my work as well as something akin to a sketchbook for future
work. There was one particular photo
collage that I loved the instant it was finished.
Back in the
summer of 2011 I did what would be first Time Travel Collage (shown above). In
the Mission, on Albion Street, there is an historic plaque commemorating the
site of the first mission that was on the shores of a small lake. I took photos of the street that I then cut
up and layered with photos of a similar lake with a marshy shore. We are fortunate to live in the Bay Area
where so much of the natural world remains accessible, intact and close
by. With this first piece, I was able to
show both the now and the then (or at least a reasonable representation of the
then).
It took until
2016, but now I have been able to focus my attention on creating a series of
time travel photos that capture the present but remind us of the past, the land
and life that was there before the city.
