About this Event
Artist Conversation: Rosecrans Baldwin and Brandon Tauszik, moderated by Alex Fierro
Saturday, May 30, 1:00 PM
PACLA @ The Reef
1933 S. Broadway
Suite 430
Join PAC LA for a conversation with Rosecrans Baldwin and Brandon Tauszik exploring issues around Tauszik's exhibition and Baldwin's book on Los Angeles titled, .The discussion will be moderated by PAC LA Board Member Alex Fierro. There were be a closing reception for the exhibition following the event.
Schedule of Events
1:00 PM – Doors Open
1:30 PM – Conversation Begins, followed by Q&A
2:30 PM – 6:00 PM – Viewing and Closing Reception
Rosecrans Baldwin is the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. Otherbooks include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ and a frequent contributor to Travel + Leisure. Other bylines include The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The New York Times Magazine. Several of his articles have been selected for the Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing collections, and he was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Journalism Award.
Brandon Tauszik is a photographer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Tauszik’s work examines contemporary American social and environmental issues, frequently taking form as immersive, multimedia projects. His work has been praised by outlets like The Washington Post, Le Monde, the British Journal of Photography, and more. Previous photobook publications by Tauszik include Water & Power (2024), Fifteen Vaults (2023), and Pale Blue Dress (2020). He is the recipient of grants from California Humanities and the Berkeley Film Foundation to support his film Living Harriet Tubman (2026), as well as the Pulitzer Centerto support his project Facing Life (2022).
Alexandra Fierro is a fine arts professional based in Los Angeles who retains a B.A. in Art History from U.C.S.B. Upon moving to Los Angeles, she visited and fell in love with the ecosystem that is Bergamot Station Arts Center and applied to be an intern for gallerist and auctioneer Robert Berman of Robert Berman Gallery & Santa Monica Auctions. Over an eight- year journey, Alex grew to love analyzing the primary vs. secondary markets for fine art and gained a wide breadth of experience in evaluating fine art of all mediums. Her personal focus and interests cover the range of Post-War through Contemporary fine art and include specific genres of photography, street art, LGBTIA+ work, artists of Los Angeles, emerging artists and artist estates. As of 2022, Alex Fierro is a specialist at Los Angeles Modern Auctions, located in Hollywood.
About Water & Power
Originally photographed in 2024, this body of work traces the vast aqueduct and hydroelectric infrastructure that sustains Los Angeles. The show consists of nine large-scale chromogenic prints, two video loops, and a vinyl wall installation. Production support was provided by Weldon Color Lab.
In the midst of Los Angeles, with its gardens and free-flowing water, you can forget how stacked the odds are there against human civilization. It seems given: There is a city, therefore there is water. To see why the order is actually reversed, you’d have to visit the Owens River Valley, an arid wasteland created when the growing city of Los Angeles decided in 1905 to suck it dry. In the 200 miles between here and there are countless structures that instantly dispel any given-ness one feels from within the city: the monumental, rusted pipes transporting Sierran snowmelt; the concrete channels across cracked, creosote-studded earth; the 100-year old hydroelectric power plants full of esoteric dials and gauges, running the water through turbines. Pretty soon, the correct sequence reveals itself: There is water — which we went to extraordinary lengths to move — therefore there is a city.
Any visual consideration of this system, presented here in large-scale color photographs, inspires contradictory feelings. There’s the sheer rapaciousness of it, the story of humans exhausting resources on a grand scale — but then there’s the grand scale itself, with all its associated feats of design, engineering, and ingenuity. There’s the solid monumentality of the industrial shapes— but also the unsettling contingency of the whole thing, the feeling of a crazy bet.
When Tauszik looked for photographs of the Los Angeles hydroelectric system, the most recent ones he found were from around 100 years ago, when it was all relatively new. His own images, echoing the formal style of those earlier ones, capture a strange bifurcation in time: the machines have remained the same — so much that one worker calls his stream-side power plant a “working museum”— but the present they inhabit has changed. The photos are in color, the population of Los Angeles has multiplied by an order of ten, and it’s drier out there in the desert. The question of water and power looms with a different kind of urgency from before. In this context, Tauszik’s photographs perform their own kind of maintenance on the system, keeping the conduit open between the public imagination and these otherwise forgotten sites.
—Jenny Odell
Event is free and open to the public.
All artist headshots at top, courtesy of artists.
All images below © Brandon Tauszik
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Reef, 1933 South Broadway, Los Angeles, United States
USD 0.00
