No history, no monuments.... 
My current investigation deals with artifice and the American landscape.  The reasons a culture wholeheartedly embraces the artifice and simulation embedded within it are rarely as obvious as the artifice itself.  My interest lies in a populations willingness to overlook a cellphone tower camouflaged as a palm tree, while simultaneously celebrating the ham-fisted fiction of Hollywood and Las Vegas. 

Better than the real thing....
The place simulations of Las Vegas are products of a culture conditioned by a mediated reality.  A place of cultural and historical relevance (a borrowed culture, an appropriated history) is aestheticized, summarized and superimposed on the Nevada desert.  A transplanted tourist destination located in an uninhabitable terrain where everything human is artificial.  The artifice and suspension of disbelief associated with Las Vegas has provided subject matter for paintings.

Better living through science....
As the number of cellphone users rises, the number of cellphone attennae must increase proportionately.  Integrating these attannae into a landscape already inundated with billboards, lampposts and power lines has become a problem.  One solution in Southern California has been to disguise the cellphone towers as trees thought to be indigenous to the location.  Through a collaborative photographic survey of southern California cellphone towers, John Brinton Hogan and I have posed this question:  What is more visually disruptive, a cellphone tower or a cellphone tower disguised as a tree?

Steven Walls
september 2006