In the summer of 2008 I received a commission from the Los Angeles County Art Commission to create an art installation for the Registrar Recorder/County Clerk Elections Operation Center (RR/CC EOC) in Santa Fe Springs. It resulted in Tree by Tree, from Sea to Mountains, a photographic banner suspended from the ceiling stretching 150 feet wide and 12 feet high.
The concept of this artwork is inspired by the central imagery of the Los Angeles County Seal, where a Native American woman stands on the shore of the Pacific Ocean with a plate of nourishment in her hands and the sun and the San Gabriel Mountains in the background. The viewer’s point of view moves in a 180° skyward pan from the Pacific Ocean to the San Gabriel Mountains. In its trajectory, the viewer encounters branches, tree trunks, the canopy of different treetops, sunrise and sunset, and open sky, all from human scale.
The RR/CC EOC is a 110,000-square-foot office and warehouse facility that handles all of the voting material for Los Angeles County. For every election the Center organizes and sends out voting booths and ballots to Los Angeles’ 5000 voting precincts. The facility also houses birth, marriage, property, and death records for the County of Los Angeles. In effect the center enables our democracy and civil rights.
The warehouse was remodeled in 2006 by Lehrer Architects as “a tribute to the infrastructure of democracy”, and its principal Michael Lehrer fought hard to get “1% for art” funding through the County’s Civic Art Policy to complete his vision with an art installation spanning the width of the interior.
In the kick-off meeting with the ad hoc Civic Art Committee, the 15 members spoke of their desire for the artwork to reflect the diversity of the county and the dignity and vitality of democracy. They cited a 120-year history to the city of Los Angeles; 120 years of social footsteps, a rich and fluid history of a coexistence of immigrants and residents. In what was once a desert, there is now a diversity of land, people and time.
In our research we discovered the Los Angeles basin before urbanization was a dry, coastal plain, with less than a dozen varieties of native trees; sycamores, oaks, walnut and a few cottonwoods. Nowadays, very few of the city’s street trees are native; eucalyptus trees are from Australia, the jacarandas from the Amazon basin, and the iconic palm trees were planted for the Olympic Games of 1932. In the 21st century Los Angeles is home to an urban forest where over 1,000 different species, varieties and cultivators coexist, and, like its people, LA’s tree population is known as among the most diverse in the world.
This cosmopolitan urban forest has set root in a place where the day is sunny on more than 320 days a year. The trees provide shade and shelter, remove carbon from the air and produce oxygen, trap air pollution, absorb storm water and hold erosion. They screen out noise and reduce stress. If one thing, the trees are model citizens, and their daily contribution to the health and wealth of the greater good of Los Angeles is a perfect metaphor to the work done by the employees at the Elections Operation Center.