The River Home
BFA Degree Show





After growing up along one of California’s last free flowing rivers, I moved to a place whose landscape did not resemble home at all. Later, in an attempt to better understand how I’m affected by my surroundings, I began talking to family, friends and strangers about their experiences with the landscapes and rivers of their homes. Some confessed a deep connection, while others denied any connection at all. After hearing many stories, I had gained a new awareness of my own ties and learned that both places were home. I looked at people through rivers and at rivers through people. I took the river to get home and began to realize that home is a flexible idea. It exists not only in the places I actually live but also in places that I connect with as if I’ve lived there. I found my displaced home tucked beneath rocks along streams and in nooks across so many cities.

When I was a child, my family and I were driving home from visiting my uncle in Lone Pine. As we drove through the Owens Valley my mom pointed out the window and told me that there used to be a lake out by the mountains but that Los Angeles needed the water and so they took it. As we drove, I stared out at the empty bed for what seemed like forever, trying in vain to imagine a lake that would fill a bed so gigantic. The large-scale pushing and pulling of land and water has now become commonplace and few stop to think much about it. Only through this redistribution was it possible for the City of Los Angeles to spring from its desert land and develop into a world city. While we gained this amazing metropolis we simultaneously lost rivers, which left their beds never to come home again. This is how it goes, on and on, each flourishing at the other’s cost.