This collage invites us to contemplate how toxicity sits in places. The image of the woman in the freeway headdress reminds us that the managing of toxicity is a burdensome act which requires careful balancing and distribution of weight. Her arms reach out on either side and her weight is spread across her shifted stance. The collage ponders what factors shape how toxicity is balanced, that is how it is spread across places.
This image is a visual collection of the ways that artists have "art-washed" toxic spaces. It serves an ethnographic purpose in representing the motivations and outcomes of artists' desires to reappropriate toxicity. I felt that the image of the freeway headdress and the drain cats were particularly effective in this regards. It was more difficult for me to make the same connection to the argument for the other images.
That floral freeway headdress: what an image! I read this as a celebration of constriction: the visible demands that this absurd headdress exerts upon the body and mind of the woman modeling it, the knot of freeway overpasses and underpasses, the snarl of traffic. Is the aestheticization of these multiple levels of constriction perhaps an act of cultural self-justification and defense against critique?We ("we") southern Californians circa 1962, the argument might go, we bear up so gracefully under the pressures of self-presentation and built environment and mobility.
