Highways connect Los Angeles’ sprawling neighborhoods through a vast concrete infrastructure. Prints of deconstructed highway architecture are paired with drawings and photo transfers of single-family homes.

Photographic images are recorded through the lens of a camera, capturing a specific moment in time and place with a fixed point of view. The source photos for these images are panorama photographs captured through the window of a moving car. Variables of time and distance are added during the image creation that takes place in the camera’s processor. The scene moves past the car window faster than the camera is able to snap photos to seamlessly overlap and blend, subtracting slices of imagery and adding artifacts.

The focused mid-ground falls between the distorted foreground and background, keeping the inhabitable landscape at a distance, just as the aspirations of the American Dream have moved beyond reach for many. Written language becomes disjointed phonetic fragments, failing their original informative purpose as the forms dissolve into abstraction.

Representing the quick, mechanically photographed landscape through slow, hand-drawn processes adds subjectivity and mediation. The mechanical, fragmented shapes emerge from the organic, fluid rendering.

Bio:
Michelle Rozic is an Associate Professor of Art, printmaking coordinator and graduate coordinator at California State University, Northridge, with an MFA in printmaking from Indiana University, Bloomington, and BFA in fine art from the Columbus College of Art & Design. She served as president of the Los Angeles Printmaking Society from 2013–2015. Michelle’s work is held in national and international collections, and her work has been featured in over one hundred national, international and traveling exhibitions. Projects include curating Edge of Life: Forest Pathology Art, a collaborative, invitational, art and forestry exhibit and accompanying catalog.