Andrew Sears
Sunset Rising (?)

November 18, 2005 to January 13, 2006

We each have no right to decide for others what is beautiful and what is ugly.
Andrew Sears.

This exhibition consists of a series of digitally enhanced photographs that document the Sunset Boulevard section of Los Angeles that runs from Silver Lake through Echo Park.  Presented here as narrow bands of photographs mounted onto aluminum plates, Sunset Rising (?)  immediately calls to mind Ed Ruscha’s famous conceptual work of 1966, Every Building on the Sunset Strip—a pioneer work in photo-text art—which painstakingly documented in black and white photography Los Angeles’s most famous boulevard replete with street addresses. Sunset Rising (?)—asan historical updating of Ruscha’s project—is also a Los Angeles streetscape of 2.5 miles of Sunset Boulevard, but it utilizes more than 1500 digital photographs and Adobe Photoshop technology which did not exist in the 1960's, to create seamless color panoramas

Ruscha described his book as “simply a collection of facts.”  Sears has more environmental concerns in mind:  the original idea for this project came about while on an elevator in Los Angeles’s City Hall having come from a planning commission meeting that basically changed the zoning on Sunset Blvd.  The new zoning effectively rendered all of the existing buildings and vacant lots under-built and therefore prone to redevelopment. Sears decided it was important that he document the street in its current state.  His interest in the Sunset Boulevard he has photographed stems from rapid change, potential loss, and the need to preserve a moment in time by creating a documentary record.  Sears summarizes the area as “shifting, from multi-cultured established Angelinos in the East to newly emigrating middle class Jetta-ites in the West.”  Like Ruscha, Sears documents—by routine, serial methodology—the common existence of this famous Los Angeles street.  Sears is a part of a new generation of image-makers (sharing similarities with the work of Catherine Opie or Andreas Gursky) critical of the faceless machine of redevelopment and urbanization.  To Sears, a street is “an active living place” where “all buildings have value through history of layered human memory.”   Sunset Rising (?) honors not only the city street, also all of the people for whom it is home.