Looking Up Through Trees
The Elections Operations Center for the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk is a location likely overlooked by many, even in the midst of this heated election cycle. This one physical space prepares voting materials for Los Angeles county and hosts over 100 employees during the months of October and November. UCLA Design Media Arts professor Rebeca Méndez has created something incredible for the employees working in this warehouse during the 2016 season.
"It’s LA, so I’m late because of traffic. On NPR, an analysis of what’s expected for the second 2016 Presidential Debate plays all the way to Santa Fe Springs, where the Elections Operations Center for the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk is tucked away within a maze of warehouses a mile from the main office. The maze seems to go on for blocks. This one center prepares materials for all of LA County, the biggest voting district in the United States with 5,000 precincts. On November 8th, these precincts will transform from churches and theatres into polling stations, inviting citizens to come and decide the future of their government.
The unassuming, hard-to-find warehouse is where all the ingredients for this metamorphosis are assembled and rolled out over many months. When polls close on November 8th, every ballot is retrieved in a single night by a fleet of Sheriff’s Deputies and helicopters coming from as far as Catalina Island. This cavalcade makes sure nothing is tampered with, a massive operation that feels less like local government than like something out of Mission Impossible. Fitting the scale of the change it facilitates, the Center’s warehouse itself is transformed by a massive piece of public art – Rebeca Méndez’s 2008 work, Tree by Tree, from Sea to Mountains. The photographic banner stretches 132 feet across one wall and rises up from the ground opposite each of the stacks to create the effect of a forest canopy.
Billie Keller, the Head of Election and Document Processing Services, shows me around the warehouse with pride, describing the staggeringly huge election operation which gives every LA citizen the vote they are entitled to. Beaming about how the artwork livens up the space, Keller describes how the one hundred temporary employees the Center has hired for this season are transported every time they look up by a meditative glimpse of sky. Artist Rebeca Méndez tells me her goal was to bring something of the outer world into the inner-world of the warehouse. The first time she visited, it was a hot day. The door was shut, with air conditioning on high blast, and she knew this windowless space needed to be cracked open, to let the outside in. She says warehouses are spaces not built to human scale, and so individual identities get lost – ironic when you consider that this warehouse stores birth, marriage, death, and property records, as well as administering elections.
In response, Méndez worked from the start with architect Michael Lehrer, who brought her in to break up the walls with sunlight, shining through the trees. A sideways ocean bleeds off the leftmost side of the giant photo banner she created, vast and placid but disorienting, as if gravity itself had changed direction. “It feels like you’re spinning around,” Keller tells me. From the ocean, the piece moves through a 180-degree skyward pan to the San Gabriel Mountains, looking up through a rich canopy of trees meant to represent the urban forest of LA County, a huge biodiversity of trees reflecting the diversity of the County’s people. The banner is matched and echoed by stripes of autumn orange on the floor and brilliant greens and reds that line the walls, synergistically blending with the warehouse design as a whole."— Brian Sonia-Wallace, Nov. 7
Read the full article at the Public+Art website.