Land Bloom 

2023-2024

It is estimated that at the time of European contact, California was home to 300,000+ Native people.  By the 1830s, when the California Mission period ended, Native populations had plummeted- decimated by violence, illness, slavery, assimilation, the impacts of the missions, and those seeking gold.  The land slowly disappeared as well- dug up for mission land, gold, oil, lumber, and water while smothered in new renditions of earth: adobe, rock, wood, asphalt, concrete, fences, walls, and borders.  Earth repurposed by the hands of brown bodies to support the enclosure and destruction of land under European notions of private property and ownership.

Land Bloom confronts these histories from the perspective of an 8th-generation Angeleno with the ancestral blood of both colonized and colonizer.  The 21 photographs in this series were created by pulling from and digitally altering institutional archives depicting the romanticized documentation of Mission architecture throughout early Alta California in an act of decolonizing, reimagining and rewilding land and history directly associated with Spanish Colonization and the California Mission system.