Few other
places figure so largely in the public imagination as Southern
California. Disneyland, Beverly Hills and Sunset Boulevard come as
smoothly off the tongue in Tulsa, Oklahoma as in Riverside,
California. An entertainment industry of multinational proportions
and an advertising industry of seemingly unlimited reach have
guaranteed that visions of the Southern half of the Golden State are
known to all across America and most points beyond.
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Yet of all the habitats the region embraces, none are as evocative as the coast line. The mythology that health and happiness can be found at the ocean's edge, a myth that with intention and success drew industry wealth and populations from the East to the West can be read across a hundred years of images. |
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Photograph by Henry Wessel |
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From stereographs to photographs to panoramas to motion pictures to television, a vision of California has been invented, recorded and commented upon by amateurs and artists, documentarians and advertisers, scholars and screenwriters.
Ocean View: The Depiction of Southern California Coastal Lifestyle presents in visual form the myths, realities and artistry of the lower half of the Western seacoast. Ocean View tells a story about a golden land, a place of "subtropical twilights and soft westerlies off the Pacific," of Waterman and Dogmen and a girl named Gidget, of failed dreams and new beginnings, of destruction and ecology.
Curator Kevin Jon Boyle has assembled an exhibition of fine arts, advertising and documentary photography and video that charts a natural and social topography from the turn-of-the-century to the present day. Besides photography and video, the exhibition also includes the totemic objects of Southern California beach culture. Motion picture stills, theatre lobby cards and television stills from the beach party films of the 1950s and 1960s to Baywatch bring added context to Boyle's survey of this singular cultural landscape.
