“1974 In California” is a project that includes photographs and video. It is the story of a “1974 In California” is the true 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.
Showcasing two different visions of California landscape development, the piece is set in a brand new tract home development on the edge of the desert built in the early 2000’s and an A-frame modernist church designed in 1962 by A. Quincy Jones.
Both forms of architecture structure how desire is or isn’t enacted within them. The new tract home with formulaic floor plans prescribes a hierarchy of bedrooms and rigid organization of kinship. The visionary, barrier-breaking modernist church seeks to expand some boundaries of social interaction while maintaining others. Inherent in both are ideas of community, connection, desire and withholding.
2004
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.
Jeannie Simms 