What have we wrought? Eternal Construction now on display at LAM
By MARRIE STONE
Much has been written about Los Angeles over the past century. Writer and film producer Delia Ephron observed, “In Los Angeles, by the time you’re 35, you’re older than most of the buildings.” Actor and musician Billy Connolly added, “I love Los Angeles. It reinvents itself every two days.” Architect Frank Lloyd Wright said, “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” And author Henry Miller offered, “Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang’s feeble imagination.”
Tyler Stalling reflected some of those sentiments when curating the Laguna Art Museum’s (LAM) current photographic exhibition Eternal Construction. Inspired by Southern California’s architecture and infrastructure, Stalling selected images from LAM’s permanent collection that illustrate the “expansion, erasure, reinvention and decay” of our region’s build environment. The assemblage seems to ask the question: Are developers friend or foe?
Click on photo for a larger image
Photos by Jeff Rovner
“Eternal Construction,” curated by Tyler Stalling and including 14 photographers from LAM’s permanent collection, is now on display through January 18, 2026
The exhibition, which will be on display through January 18, 2026 is part of LAM’s 13th Annual Art + Nature celebration. Fourteen photographers’ works are represented. They serve as a foil to both the colorful Conrad Buff retrospective next door and the reflective community-centric installation SOS happening on Main Beach this weekend. Walking between Silence & Solitude (the two-story Buff exhibit) and Eternal Construction, it’s difficult not to think: What hath man wrought on our planet?
Buff painted the untouched landscapes of the American Southwest – Arizona, California and Utah – in all their natural vibrancy. Rugged, uncultivated and unexplored were the territories he rendered in large-scale oil paintings created in the early to mid-20th century.
In contrast, many of the photographs Stalling chose are black and whites. While also devoid of people, human impact sits at the forefront. Abandoned gas stations, airport runways, a desalination plant, the L.A. riverbed, shipping containers and railroads – lots of steel and concrete, but scarcely a person in sight.
Click on photo for a larger image
Laurie Brown’s first book of photographs, “Recent Terrains: Terraforming the American West,” was published in 2000
“Conrad Buff depicted the American Southwest as this untouched wilderness where God (or the spirit) was in the landscape. I was aware that the show was going to be here, so Eternal Construction was purposely done in contrast. By coincidence, Buff died in 1975. Eternal Construction picks up that same year,” Stalling said.
“Eternal Construction is all human-made, yet there are no people, so it has a dystopian quality to it. Most of this construction is all about creating the city as a machine for the benefit of humans.”
Stalling offered these comments as part of a panel discussion hosted by LAM on October 25. Photographers Tom Lamb, Jacques Garnier and Luke Erickson shared the background and insights behind their work on display. (Full disclosure: I moderated their conversation.)
Click open story button to continue reading…
Click on photo for a larger image
(L-R) Photographers Tom Lamb, Luke Erickson and Jacques Garnier appeared at a panel discussion to discuss “Eternal Construction” on October 25 at LAM
The show includes two pieces by Lamb, known for his aerial abstract landscapes. Lamb estimates he’s logged well over 1,000 helicopter flights in more than 30 years of documenting the impact of industrial development on our planet, particularly in and around Orange County. His decades of flyovers have revealed significant changes to the land itself.
The images of the Ontario Airport runways included in this show were made during the pandemic, when Lamb gained rare access to the normally restricted airspace. But his work often includes abandoned or transitioning landscapes. They tell stories of how we’ve marked the land and how we’re stripping the planet of its most valued resources.
Lamb describes being in a helicopter as a kind dream state. With each trip, he records only a moment in time. The photographs change as soon as rain falls or strips of concrete are repainted.
“Even after a thousand flights, it’s always a surprise,” Lamb said. “It’s always unique. Nothing is premeditated. I might go to a place thinking I’m going to see one thing, and then I see something completely unique.”
Click on photo for a larger image
Tom Lamb with his two pieces documenting the Ontario Airport during the pandemic
For abstract photographer Jacques Garnier, his work is less about documentation than about creating a mood. He focuses largely on erasure, extracting the elements of his subject matter (often buildings and architecture) that detract from the overall aesthetic. Garnier leaves his viewer with a quiet, Zen-like experience upon which to meditate. At the Crossroad is a desalination plant located just south of Oceanside. He made the photograph a decade ago, jumping a fence into a restricted area to obtain the angle he wanted.
“I react to what the environment gives me,” Garnier said. “Then I push photography as far as it can go. I take viewers out of the way they traditionally look at photography and push my photographs to their extreme limits. That’s where minimalism and negative space come from – the erasing, the reduction.”
The result is taking a traditionally loud and ugly structure – like a desalination plant – and reimagining it as quiet and serene.
Click on photo for a larger image
Jacques Garnier with “At the Crossroads,” an image of a desalination plant just south of Oceanside
Eternal Construction also includes a replica of The Great Picture, which holds the world’s record for the largest photograph ever created (32’ x 111’). Garnier worked on this project in 2006 alongside fellow photographers Clayton Spada, Rob Johnson, Douglas McCulloh, Mark Chamberlain and Jerry Burchfield. The Legacy Project Collaborative – which included hundreds of volunteers, artists and experts – spent thousands of hours transforming the abandoned El Toro Marine Corps Air Station into a gigantic camera.
Click on photo for a larger image
Jacques Garnier (R) with Clayton Spada, two photographers who worked on “The Great Picture” in 2006
Photographer Luke Erickson, who resides in Minneapolis, documented the L.A. River after receiving his master’s degree in the history of architecture and art. Erickson’s thesis examined the Los Angeles County transportation master plan from 1924-1941. His research uncovered plans to turn the L.A. riverbed into a trucks-only freeway to transport food from the farming communities. This struck him as a profoundly dystopian idea.
“At first, I thought about it as a tragedy,” Erickson said. “But as I was jumping over chain link fences and walking the bed of the L.A. River, it was quiet and really lovely. It became a meditative thing.”
Erickson documented the river during the dusky “magic hour.” “It had this iconic quality, like the ruins of a Roman aqueduct. My images look like stills from a 1940s film noir.”
Click on photo for a larger image
Photographer Chris Bliss and his wife examine Luke Erickson’s L.A. Riverbed series
The images in Eternal Construction might, on first glance, appear as relatively mundane, discarded or tarnished landscapes. But the infrastructure our eye often overlooks is the very thing that allows our society to function. “We’ve transformed nature to serve our own purposes,” Erickson said. “It’s interesting to see how, despite our best efforts, nature is clawing its way back.”
Last year, I wrote about photographer John Humble’s exhibition at LAM entitled Sunday Afternoon. Humble passed away earlier this year, but three of his works are included in Eternal Construction. Those photographs were also hard fought, especially after 9/11. Turns out, the Port Authority doesn’t appreciate photographers documenting the city’s infrastructure. Cops were called on a regular basis.
Click on photo for a larger image
Visitors gaze at excerpts from John Humble’s “Sunday Afternoon” series. Humble passed away earlier this year.
When writing about that installation, I came across the term “latigo,” coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Taken from the words labyrinth (a maze of tortuous complexity) and vertigo (the whirling sensation of looking down from great heights), Koenig defined latigo as follows:
“A dizzying sense of awe at the sheer scale of modern society –looking out at a city so vast and complex it can barely be mapped, with millions of miles of roads and power lines and water mains that must be continually repaired and replaced every few years, feeding a labyrinth of supply chains and regulations and contracts and algorithms – a system so massive that individual people seem almost beside the point, that if everybody were to vanish all at once, the city would sigh and carry on its business.”
Walking through Eternal Construction will give you that sense. The remedy? Step back in time to Conrad Buff next door. Then, when you leave the museum, head to Heisler Park. Stand on the edge of the surf and gaze out across the Pacific. Whatever we have wrought, the natural world endures.
