Alterations

"Alterations" explores the California front yard garden as a midcentury cultural phenomenon. Often considered a banal or mundane space, the front yard is also a cultural space, a container of history, an outward expression of aspirations and ideals. While living in Northern California, Waters took daily walks encountering remnant forms of mid-century landscaping - shrubs and trees altered to fit the lines of a suburban built environment. The constant cutting of this plant life by homeowner-gardeners, landscaping contractors, and Latino day laborers, engaged in a perpetual struggle for the creation of order over verdant chaos, revealed a desire to domesticate nature, to bring order to landscapes where unkempt wildness might otherwise prevail. "In witnessing myriad shrubs and trees being shaped to fit the lines of the urban environment I came to feel empathy for these living forms, the inherent inclination to grow wild, in unpredictable ways, here made to conform to a suburban order of concrete lines and neatness. I also came to observe a personal recognition, a metaphorical depiction, for how we may each allow ourselves to be shaped by the demands of urban living, the ways we are compelled to alter our own needs and compulsions to exist, or to contend with the homogenizing forces of labor, efficiency, and utility."