American Entropy (2005)

 
 
American Entropy
C-Prints
22 x 22 Inches
2005
 
 
This series of photographs was taken inside four aging barns in rural Langley – an outlying suburb of Vancouver, BC. In recent years, this once-vibrant agricultural landscape, has been thoroughly reconfigured by residential and commercial development. Townhouses and industrial warehousing, built over demolished farm properties, have changed the agrarian core of the region. Owners of increasingly unprofitable farmlands consider cashing out; high property values for subdivided agricultural land undermine any imaginable benefits of continued farm production.
 
As inactive farms become neglected, barns undergo a change of use to provide a minimal income for owners awaiting inevitable development. Many farm buildings now serve as cheap storage warehousing for unused leisure goods; ironically, the cars, boats, trailers and mobile homes stored here often come from new housing developments growing up around these derelict farms.
 
The American Entropy photographic series is a partial view into the developed world’s societal compulsion to acquire, collect, and hoard the leisure objects of its surplus capital and debt. Bound within the drive for ownership, possession, and property, this corrupted ideal of the American Dream underscores a misguided alliance between personal belongings and private land ownership, between consumption and development.