How to View a Landfill

‘How to View a Landfill’, artist book, edition of 60, printed by Super Hit Press and Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, 2019

Text from the artist:

In 2017 I began asking groups of people to draw as I read aloud. I read them the scenic descriptions from an environmental impact report of Los Angeles’s largest landfill. Participants listened to the descriptions and with markers and paper in hand, drew the landscapes that came into their minds.

The drawings featured in ‘How to View a Landfill’ were made by the students of the Los Feliz Charter School for the Arts over the course of many studio visits during my residency there in 2018. They are depictions of two key observation points looking towards the landfill from the rural canyon north of the city.

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Susanna Battin has exhibited at MOCA Tucson, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, Gas Gallery, and Human Resources LA. She is interested in how images shape people’s relationships with land, and the performance of images within the history of colonization. She works between video, cartography, collage, painting, social action, and reading legal documents and nature poems. Battin teaches and co-runs SNAG (School of New Art Geographies) in Tucson, AZ.