The Bronson Caves are located in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park and are famous as a filming location to countless motion pictures and television shows. Early after its creation in 1903 as excavation routes for a quarry company, movie studios began renting the site for filming. The caves’ cinematic history begins here and continues to the present day. Over the course of this history, the caves are documented as an unchanging landscape amidst a chaotic specter of fictional realities. Cinema has imaged events from explosions and gunfights to the creation of cave paintings and alien abductions at the Bronson Caves. With each cinematic event the landscape’s existence morphs and adapts to new realities, an asteroid colony one event, a vampire lair the next. The site is a truly unique and relatively unknown American landscape. In the series of photographs titled Bronson Caves, I am attempting to photograph the caves's extensive cinematic history in one moment, collapsing space and time. To do this I meditated on all the millions of movements and actions recorded by cinema at the caves, and I performed for the camera with massive sheets of colored paper. Since a long-exposure photograph was produced rather than a motion picture, the papers were recorded as voluminous, glowing colors. The paper was transformed, and the materiality of the rainbowed forms, emerging from the mouth of the cave, dancing about the canyon, and bubbling up from the ground, are based solely in the photographic process, which can only be experienced when viewing the final photographic images. If a visitor to the caves were to accidently stumble upon my performance they would only see a mass of crumbled colored paper draped awkwardly over a man moving/dancing to a camera positioned on a tripod. The goal of my performances and ultimatley the photographs were to create sculptural, photographic objects that interact with the history and architecture of the caves.
.jpg)
