Chris Young

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

My practice consists of identifying highly specific post-wilderness sites signifying a locus amoenus* and referent to the Anthropocene. “Sketching” in the field with an analogue large-format camera, I record multiple sheets of film from one perspective with various settings at different times of the day. In the studio, fragments or pixels of the separate exposures are digitally composed to form a single ‘pictorial’ result. While based entirely on natural light and subject, it is not a document of a location at a moment in time; it is specifically an image of a place that has never existed outside of time; that is and is not there. Drawing on — and critical of — conventions in Western landscape photography, I am interested in the urban/wildland environment as neither dystopian topography nor romanticized wilderness (with its concordant loss as a refuge for ideals or origin of the other) but as a reality of change, plastic and uneven: a continuum.

Artwork

• Elysian Valley, Los Angeles River, 2022. pigment print
• Glendale Narrows, Los Angeles River, 2022. pigment print
• Golden State, Los Angeles River, 2022. pigment print
• Watmough Bay Preserve, 2022. pigment print
• Coos Bay Slash, 2022. pigment print
• Coachella Valley Preserve, 2021. pigment print
• locus instabilis (Spoon Lake, Montana), 2021. pigment print
• Mile 77, Route 2, 2021. pigment print