“1974
In California” is a project that includes photographs and video. It is
the story of a Scottish immigrant who fell in love with a Catholic priest
in the early 1970's during a time when dynamic, progressive change was
taking place in the Catholic Church and in the women's movement. A young
woman: a recent immigrant also from Glasgow, retells the story in first
person.
In an era when sexuality is correlated with individual desire, “1974 In
California” looks at sexuality within the context of institutions: marriage,
the Catholic church and architectural design.
Photographed in an A-frame modernist church designed by A. Quincy Jones
(whose vision was one of using architecture to, literally, open up physical
space and racial barriers while promoting early sales to African-Americans
and Asian-Americans in the nineteen fifties) and on a contemporary tract
home development, the piece juxtaposes two different visions of architectural
idealism for communities. The new tract home development is a highly controlled
and lush oasis surrounded on all sides by desert, offering Spanish style
villa "McMansions" for the newly migrated population of middle-class television
and entertainment workers in the Santa Clarita Valley.
 
|