CHERIE BENNER DAVIS

Los Angeles is a driving town. It was planned that way--its concrete structures having been built at a time when automobiles were rapidly becoming the transportation mode-of-choice. In this place, owning a car is mostly considered a necessity and seemingly is connected to the idealism of the American Dream. LA’s concrete highways are part of our landscape, as much as palm tree-lined streets, manicured lawns and scavenging seagulls. We map our lives as we move throughout this place: What time of day are we traveling? Are we taking THE 405; THE 10; THE 101…? My father, a native Angelino, always drove convertibles—a residual symbol of the era in which he came of age. To him, the act of driving these cars in the city conjured a sense of freedom and virility. Perhaps today’s LA still beckons to some with a similar promise, regardless of whether it really has ever been so. The paintings in LA Pastoral derive from my own travels through this basin. Photographs of structures, interchanges or singular moments were taken on my daily commutes. The photos were used as source material for paintings in which some element has been isolated and manipulated: a careening off-ramp positioned against an empty sky. Here the colors are often exaggerated, sometimes surreal; the form is flattened and the surfaces pristine. All evidence of a human presence has been erased: there are no cars, telephone poles or skid marks. This is Los Angeles imagined: a pre-built ideal or a post-apocalyptic dream.