The Journey is the Destination: Recording Los Angeles
August 25 – November 6, 2025
Reception: Thursday, September 11 from 5:00 to 7:30pm
The Journey is the Destination: Recording Los Angeles explores the city’s multifaceted neighborhoods, landscapes, and cultural histories through the work of seven Los Angeles-based artists. Each artist has built deep personal connections to the neighborhoods and corridors they chronicle. Their works challenge the Western colonial idea of mapping, a system dominated by occupying or state-sanctioned agencies. These artists seize the power to document and share the history of this city through the lens of their own, everyday experiences living here. They demonstrate that “mapping” can take many forms – moving beyond a flat, static representation to a multi-dimensional record of the city.
The artists and their works in the exhibition reflect the diversity of Los Angeles. Their works range from the representational to abstract, from the two to three dimensional, and are created with a variety of materials. They depict numerous neighborhoods and geographical features throughout the region and capture traces of the many people who have traversed these places. They mark not only the city’s surfaces, but survey the many forms of layers that lie underneath it – such as histories of migration, governmental policies, and environmental change. Contrary to colonial mapping which requires distilling a site to a flat system of symbols, the exhibition artists’ works are acts of accumulation. They not only dig through the physical changes that have occurred in Los Angeles over time, but also unearth the cultural and psychological shifts that have also built some of the many communities that are here today.
Exhibition Artists: Fía Benitez, Aaron Douglas Estrada, Vincent Enrique Hernandez, Erick Medel, Debra Scacco, Pamela Smith Hudson, Marisela Norte.
This exhibition was curated by Holly Jerger, CSUN Art Galleries Director. The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication and Louise Lewis. Additional support provided by the Instructionally Related Activities Committee and Arts Council for CSUN.
Image: Debra Scacco, Pyramid, 2024. Soot, glue, water, wind, wax, aqueduct dirt, California clay on paper, 25 x 46 inches. Courtesy of Debra Scacco Studio.