A creative project translating literature into urban archetypes using art to interpret the perceived illusions of the Los Angeles dream

Mike Davis argues that the culture, architecture, and life of Los Angeles County, California reflect its folkways and mores, which in turn affect the ethics and morality of the city. My Creative Project/dissertation examines through the process of translating literature and art history, the role of aesthetic of modernism plays in art and literature in Los Angeles. Modernism comprises the innovative movements and styles of the 20th century while post-modernity is a reaction to these concepts. I argue that the modernistic stance forged new paradigms of thought. I demonstrate through original art that the perceived illusions of urban archetypes are not representative of the California dream, but instead are a lens to observe the heartbeat of Los Angeles, its transgressions, struggles, and changes. My seven works of art on paper, 15" x 20", utilize mixed media. They were exhibited at a one-man art show, including an exhibition catalogue with a description of each work on paper, and an interpretative paragraph of text that discussed the connections among my fields of study in the form of a "Dialogues with My Muse." The catalogue will have references to art history with relevant reproductions by representative artists, representative authors, along with references to urban theories about art and literature within Los Angeles. I will draw from literary texts by John Dos Passos, Berthold Brecht, and James Ellroy that concern the dynamic of the ever-changing imbalances in Los Angeles County. I will draw upon the artworks of David Hockney, Richard Diebenkorn, Edward Kienholz, the urban iconography of Frank Romero, and Wayne Thiebaud, along with mural art from the streets and freeways of Los Angeles. The textual references underscore and expand useful ambiguities in my own art works. What modern imagination has done is to help forge new paradigms of thought and become simultaneously able to allow time/space realities, literature, and art history to arrive at a contemporary view of urban archetypes, all of which allow the pathfinder to inhabit the avant-garde aesthetic and become a harbinger of new ideas.