Los Angeles Against the Mountains

In celebration of the Persian New Year and the first day of spring, JOAN presents Los Angeles Against the Mountains on Friday, March 20 at the Santa Fe Dam Recreational Area, as part of the public programs organized in conjunction with Roksana Pirouzmand’s multi-venue exhibition, everything was once something else (the land was the sea, the sea was the land), on view at JOAN and OXY ARTS.

Los Angeles Against the Mountains is a three-mile walking tour of the Santa Fe Dam led by Hunter Baoengstrum, founder and general manager of the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Infrastructure Inspections. Along the trail, Baoengstrum will discuss how the forces of erosion bend space across Southern California through the violent beauty of the San Gabriel Mountains.

The walk will include three different stops, where writers Jamil G Baldwin, Michael Ned Holte, Theo Meranze, and Lara Sarkissian will read from their own work as well as from texts related to the exhibition’s themes, including the Iranian diaspora, the erosion of landscape, and the connection between distant places through technology. 

We will meet at the Santa Fe Dam Recreational Area (34.113278, -117.955820) at 1pm and begin walking at 1:30pm. Please bring comfortable walking shoes and sun protection. Light snacks and hydration will be provided at the beginning of the inspection, as per Cal/OSHA T8CCR 3395.

Public bathrooms are available (open from 6:30am-7pm) near the main beach area, trailhead, picnic areas, and the nature center.

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Hunter Baoengstrum currently lives and works car-free in Los Angeles as an artist, urban planner, and cyclist. He organizes critical group bike rides and walks that investigate different systems within urban planning as the founder and general manager of the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Infrastructure Inspections, and enjoys painting MUTCD-compliant pedestrian safety markings in his free time. He has produced tours and works in collaboration with other artists for public programs hosted by Canary Test, Human Resources, François Ghebaly, Other Places Art Fair, Melrose Botanical Garden, Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), Plot, Photographic Arts Council Los Angeles, and Clockshop. Baoengstrum’s documents and materials produced from past inspections can be found at the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA).

Jamil G Baldwin was born in Lancaster and raised across the Inland Empire and Los Angeles. His images and writings are often rooted in his relationships to geography, neighbors, and family. They are housed within, or transformed into, objects that reward curiosity and patience, highlighting practices of connection with respect to place and community. His work has been exhibited at LACE, Pioneer Works, Belfast Photo Festival, Lagos Photo Festival, and featured in The New York Times, Aperture, Der Greif, i-D, Matte Editions, JRNL, Callaloo, and Fortunately Magazine. Baldwin co-founded LocallyGrownTV, a radically centered digital TV initiative that reimagines television from before for the now as a way to reclaim broadcasts ability to build community. The project was featured in WIRED and The New Yorker.

Michael Ned Holte is a writer, curator, and educator living in Los Angeles. He is the author of Good Listener: Meditations on Music and Pauline Oliveros (Sming Sming Books). His exhibitions include how we are in time and space: Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif, Barbara T. Smith, at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; Routine Pleasures at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; and Made in L.A. 2014 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Since 2009, he has been a member of the faculty of the Program in Art at CalArts, and he currently serves as an Associate Dean of the School of Art.

Theo Meranze is a writer from Los Angeles. His prose, poetry, and criticism have been published in publications such as The Georgia Review, Elephant Magazine, and Prelude Magazine.

Lara Sarkissian is a Los Angeles-based electronic musician and sound artist from San Francisco whose work engages contemporary diasporic subcultures, sonic archives, and speculative approaches to electronic composition. Through her label btwn Earth+Sky and broadcasts on NTS Radio, Sarkissian explores regional electronic lineages alongside Armenian archival sound and remnants shaped by her family’s Iranian-Armenian roots. Formerly co-running the experimental curatorial platform CLUB CHAI, Sarkissian has performed at MoMA PS1, Unsound, Public Records, Roskilde, Asian Art Museum, and Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Her interdisciplinary practice spans sound installation, audiovisual work, and film scoring, with projects presented at the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, Gropius Bau, MASS MoCA, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and Music Center Los Angeles.