Where does “the ocean” begin and end? Taking Southern California watersheds' drainage flows and static coastlines as boundary problems, artist Jesse Colin Jackson, anthropologist Valerie Olson, and ecologist Steve Allison seek to de-inscribe “the Pacific” as a discrete and total waterform. Following the Santa Ana River in reverse-course, 96 miles inland from the Pacific and across its 2,650 square mile watershed, the project troubles the imperial blue line of water and land, contesting authoritative oceanographic inscriptions of boundaries and reinscribing the discrete blue, brown, green, white, and out-of-view spaces mapped, through mark, color, and line, in ways that reify Western visions of elemental separations and orders.
Background video: Excerpt from Santa Ana Fall Line (moving), Jesse Colin Jackson, 2021.
