If posting has been a little sparse here lately it's because I've been writing lots of words in other places. But I've still been regularly dunking my head in art, and occasionally I've been driving long distances to do so. To Bolinas, for example, where the Museum there is currently showing some of Lukas Felzmann's spectacular photos of California's central valley. It's a landscape many of us on the coast dismiss without a second thought, but Felzmann finds the eerie beauty in water making a new channel through dusty earth, rays of light finding their way through the cracks in a barn, a profusion of criss-crossing pawprints dried into a riverbed. As John Berger writes in the book from which the exhibition images are taken: "A road home can be triumphant and nondescript." By theming his photographic journeys around water, arguably the most valuable and contested resource in California, Felzmann manages to encompass the whole of the state's history. He might not be a native Californian (having grown up in Zürich), but I am. And his pictures do feel like home.
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