Sentient Terrains/LA presents interrelated themes of recent work developed and selected for Dog’s Breakfast in Los Angeles. The works include: several of the Meta-Site: Vascular Facies Flag series accompanied by a large photographic ‘Witness’ image, a multi-media, poetic/geologic investigation into the Transverse Ranges that stretch from the Channel Islands to the Mojave desert forming the northern reaches of the Los Angeles area, a Vector Ship ceramic work, geologic brick and a older columnar architecture/geology work.

Meta-site Flag: Vascular Facies works herald and explore themes of metabolism and trans-material sentient possibilities. This series signals a gradient or flow between two metabolic states, sentient to non-sentient, organic to non-organic and potential alchemical/empathetic valences implying a poetic, if not actual, unity or continuity between states. In the exhibition Sentient Terrains, 2023, Anglim/Trimble Gallery, San Francisco, CA, the photographic work, Witness/Séance: Turban/Coal, 1996-2023, as here at Dog’s Breakfast, was shown with Meta-site Flag: Vascular Facies (Chlorophyll), 2023 and others of this series. Two new flags of this group, Meta-site Flag: Vascular Facies (Red Oxygen) and Meta-site Flag: Vascular Facies (Pillow Basalt/Gray Oxygen), both 2024, introduce molecular oxygen into this conversation, implying atmospheric bio/mineral currents. Oxygen in ionized form has played a role in earlier work as in the Land Kiln: Metabolism and Mortality/O2, 1992. Metabolic attributes are at the core of the environmental Land Kilns, 1979-92, and related ceramic/site-based process works. Ancient sunlight, a fundamental geo-metabolic premise of the vascular nature of the Land Kilns, can be understood as a catalytic revealing of alternate, “organic,” interpretations of “inorganic” substances, transformation and systems. This revelation is implicit and intuited in the conceptualization of the all the Vascular Facies works. They embrace a metabolic order at a global scale over large orders of time and magnitude, a ‘synthetic ecology’ (Hegel) of metamorphic facies, perturbations, and an evolving phase space of material/energy ontology.

As extensions of the Geology Flags, 2004-present and Venice Substructure Complex, 2016-2024, the flag Vascular Mantle (Transverse Range Rotation/Ghost Orchid Vectors), is a new site/process flag along with an articulated aerial diagram, Ship/Ghost Orchid Vector Study: Transverse Range Transtentional Phase / Pre-Miocene > Holocene Rotation/Shearing / Symbolic Euler Pole - West Adams, Los Angeles, CA, 2024. They together investigate the unique geologic phenomena of the rotation and of the Transverse Range block since the Miocene era. A symbolic Euler pole (rotational axis), for the pivoting block is proposed for the West Adam exhibition site. The rotating “Ghost Orchid Vectors”of this flag, also shown as translucent images on the site diagram, are metaphorical agents exploring the dynamics of rotation, transform fault displacement and para-organic processes from the fluid/vascular mantle interface to surficial terrains in the ongoing development of this salient part of the LA landscape. A companion flag, Vascular Mantel Facies Flag (Abandoned Ridge/Rodriguez Seamount), 2024, celebrates an underwater seamount, once an island, to the west of the Channel Islands of the Transverse Range block. The genesis of this seamount is complexly associated/layered in the larger plate tectonic processes that produced the rotation of the Transverse Ranges. The New York based curator, Oscar Salguero, recently noted the site/metabolic facies flags, “...meld biologic and geologic imagery and declare the sovereignty of these planetary processes.”

The ceramic works, Vector Ship Transect: Lava Ship/Orange Ship, 2023, and Serpentinite Precursor (PERIDOTITE), 2021, provide a segue and further explore the energy, climatic and metabolic/metamorphic transitions of the Vascular Facies and Transverse Range investigations. Like the Transverse Range images, Vector Ships employ the concept of a vector, or directional symbol to bring mapping and energy systems through the ship image into larger processes of land and sea transformation. The Meta-site/Vascular Facies Flag group, threaded throughout the exhibition, further aligns organic/inorganic themes and facies of climate, geology, vascular systems and anabolic/catabolic processes of global metabolism. Diagenetic Map: Stratigraphic Column II, 2023, brings architecture in the larger conversation of metabolic and material processes. The ‘strata’ of the column’s alternating geologic and architectural images have been digitally ‘lithified’ by compression and elongation. The images are image maps of a larger installation on existing columnar support structures. The discourse of these lithified strata implies displacement, energy and analogs to human/natural processes and the site/paleo-geographic theme of “..landscapes made of previous landscapes...”