Coincidental Accretion #005, Long Beach, 2012

Coincidental Accretion: Visualizing Mass Consumption at the Port of Los Angeles

Located in the San Pedro neighborhood of Los Angeles, the Port of Los Angeles is a 7500-acre seaport that, in conjunction with the port of Long Beach built adjacent to it, is the largest port in the United States. Employing over 316000 people that help import and export over 7.8 million twenty-foot containers a year, it ranks as the 6th busiest port in the world.

Among it’s top trading partners are China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Thailand with whom consumer items such as furniture, footwear, toys, automobile parts, as well as women’s and children’s apparel are some of the high volume of goods imported yearly. Diesel-fueled semi-trailer trucks and locomotives are at constant beck and call to be unloaded and loaded with containers. Coincidental Accretion investigates the accumulative effects of mass consumption on any given space, in this case the seaport of Los Angeles.

Hovering between 1000-2500 feet from a helicopter, I began photographing various structures that began to define volume and structure space, while creating fleeting patterns from their metric arrangements that resulted in adventitious optical and color effects. Structures such as the automatons, cargo ships, semi-trailer trucks and locomotives that handled and carried the stacked containers, all contributed toward an unending plethora of coincidental sculptures formed by the unchecked demand of mass consumerism.

In his seminal essay entitled Specific Objects, the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd wrote that, Most sculpture is made part by part, by addition, composed. The main parts remain fairly discrete. They and small parts are a collection of variations, slight through great. I was drawn to Judd’s idea of how objects can be brought together in a way that depersonalizes them as they achieve pure form in the space occupied and created by the objects. I also began to consider my photographs as a collection of variations in the supply and demand of mass consumption that involuntarily or voluntarily guides the overall composition of the structures.

The final set of images is offered to the viewer as a portal into a non-illusionistic space in which the basic elements such as color, form and material, combine to reflect the indeterminate scale of mass consumption.