Golden Gate Bridgeless Paintings

Golden Gate Bridge-less (from the Bridge-less series), oil and digital pigment print on canvas, 5 × 7 ft., 2006. Installation view: Project Space, Headlands Center for the Arts. Photo: Jeffery Cross

 A large-scale digital pigment print and oil painting in which I enlarged an online pixelated image of the Golden Gate Bridge, then painted out the bridge itself, re-imagining the pre-bridge landscape. Only the shadow remains. Made during a year-long Headlands Center for the Arts UC Berkeley MFA Fellowship, the work emerged from archival research into the bridge's contested painterly history in the 1930s. Ambiguously photograph and painting, past and present, touched and untouched, erased and revealed—it anticipates the hybrid print/painting approach, archival research, and the ethics of looking central to Painting Cathedral Rock and Nothing Less Than A Complete Change of Heart.