Los Angeles is one of the most mediated places in America. For many – myself included – it is first, or foremost, encountered through the city playing itself, endlessly reimagined in cinema and television. Myth and reality collapse onscreen and off, the American dream repeatedly shading into nightmares that expose its many fantasies and dispossessions. Long cast as an eternally sunny, entertainment-driven utopia, the city is draped in a polished image of the perfect life that, when tugged at, reveals the metropolis’s seam-busting contradictions, its excess wealth and widespread homelessness, resource abundance and ecological exhaustion. What appears as effortless glamor clouds over, and eventually binds aspiration and instability into the same civil system. “Everything you read about Los Angeles is true,” once remarked Giovanni Intra, the late artist, writer, gallerist (including Julie Becker’s), and altogether seminal figure, circa 2000, in the maturation of LA’s art scene. “The city adapts to its own mythology. It’s such a ludicrously discussed place that I always feel slightly idiotic in my attempts to produce a serious discourse about it.”
The work of Angeleno Julie Becker (1972–2016) articulates one rather enthralling attempt, by crystallizing the tensions that shaped the city in the 1990s – a period marked by widening economic divides and civil unrest in the aftermath of the brutal, racially charged police beating of Rodney King – and by constantly returning to LA’s disjunct between promise and constraint. Working across drawing, collage, video, photography, and installation, her practice grounded Conceptualism in a material investigation of social class. Her sensitivity to unstable architectures can be traced to an itinerant upbringing with her artist parents, as well as to her adult life in Echo Park, a once underserved neighborhood then undergoing rapid gentrification. She didn’t comment on these conditions directly; instead, the bleak realities of single-room occupancy housing, dilapidated rentals, and improvised interiors seeped into her work, without displacing its often tongue-in-cheek sensibility. As writer Sabrina Tarasoff notes, “Somehow Becker retrieved from domestic darkness the miracle of a bright imaginary.” In a place where movie sets and motels share the same flimsy provisionality, she developed an artistic vocabulary that illuminates the porous boundary between “home” and “haunted house,” as much as a dialectic of alienation and belonging. These concerns perhaps find their clearest form in Researchers, Residents, A Place to Rest (1993–96).
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