La
Conchita mon amour is a multimedia site study of the aftermath of debris flow
in a beach town in southern California, La Conchita, on January 10, 2005. For
eighteen months I visited La Conchita at one month intervals, shooting and drawing
within the shattered spaces and vernacular shrine building . La Conchita's setting
of powerful natural cycles, from the tides to the recurrence of debris flow in
winter, found an algorithmic analog through editing with seventies-era sequencers
at the Experimental Television Center,
New York, in winter 2005; later I remixed this content in nonlinear digital editing.
In summer 2006 I shot HD video; some of this content is here downsampled for the
net. Kyong Mee Choi shared her electronic voice composition,
TAO (2005) for video installation
and now for the net. Special thanks to the people of La Conchita for allowing me to explore their
spontaneous structures built to defy indifference.
For
Turbulence, the online interactive work La
Conchita mon amour is an elegy to the lost lives at La Conchita.
Quicktime
and Flash plugins, fast connection.
Launch
online project: la conchita
mon amour
Currently
on exhibition in New York: La Conchita mon amour: video, drawing, photography
at
Sara
Tecchia Roma New York, October 19 to November 22, 2006
.
on
bare life and the traumatic landscape: an interview Christina McPhee with Amy
Wiley on VIROSE
catalog
excerpts and video stills on re-title.com
catalog:
La Conchita mon amour
With
this new body of work, McPhee continues her exploration of the synchronicity between
natural disaster and human trauma
at the tiny coastal town of La Conchita, California. This community, just north
of Los Angeles on Highway 1/101, is built on an ancient mudslide and has been
subject to periodic massive debris flows. The most recent, in 2005, took ten lives
and left a huge mass of fallen mountain on the town. Yet the inhabitants must
continue to stay, despite the inevitable recurrence of this threat. La Conchita
remaps the problematic of living with disaster in California in immediate, raw
terms, since the trauma is always already here. Global warming appears to be accelerating
the danger. Without resources for healing or leaving, La Conchita lives on in
abandonment. The plight of residents at La Conchita is a microcosm of the conditions
of bare life in post-911 material culture.
California-based
Christina McPhee (1954 Los Angeles)
interprets the sense of place in drawing, video installation, and multimedia.
She works in remote landscapes at the edges of the urban condition.
Christina
McPhee's photography, drawing and time based arts explore the phenomenology of
place. She has recently created theatrical video for Pamela Z's "Wunderkabinet",
an opera based on stories from the Museum of Jurassic Technology, opening this
month at REDCAT Theatre, Walt Disney Music Hall, Los Angeles. Her films and interactive media have shown at FILE
Sao Paulo, prog:me Rio de Janeiro, ICA /Cybersonica; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley;
and is in the collections of Cornell University Rose Goldsen Archive of Electronic
Media Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art Artport, and the New Museum of Contemporary
Art / Rhizome Artbase. Her paintings and drawings are found in American museums
including the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Her multichannel video installation
"Carrizo Diaries" on seismic memory was shown this summer (2006) at
the Cartes Centre for Art and Technology,
Espoo (Helsinki), Finland with support from the American Scandinavian Foundation,
following solo exhibition at Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden (2005).
Her writing on the poetics of electronic space, trauma, and identity have
been published online for Neural and CTheory..