A California Legend

1997

A California Legend was realized while studying at the California Institute of the Arts in the mid-1990s. The Installation was subsequently included in the Never, Never Land Exhibition, curated by Omar López-Chahoud, which travelled to several venues. Aspects of the project were also shown at American Fine Arts Gallery in New York. The work was the result of three years of research on the histories of Cal Arts and the surrounding area of Valencia, California, and generated several forms, including the Installation shown here (Cal Arts, 1997). The work explored relationships between Cal Arts, Walt Disney and the Walt Disney Corporation, the town of Valencia, its development corporation, Newhall Land and Farming, and the professional art world. 

According to legend, gold was discovered by a Mexican ranch-hand attached to a wild onion in 1842 in Placerita Canyon - what is now part of Valencia - seven years prior to its discovery at Sutter’s Mill. This touched off a smaller, though not insignificant, “gold rush,” than that of the more famous one of 1849. The site is the present location of the Disney Golden Oak Ranch.

—Stephan Pascher (from lecture notes)

The Installation includes scale models of model homes - built to promote the new master planned developments in Valencia - an MDF platform of soil with onion plants (which the new developments replaced), grow lights; a blueprint fold-out booklet containing a timeline that traces the interrelated  histories of Cal Arts, Valencia, et al; and a large digital print collage of documents regarding those histories.

The “Stevenson Ranch” photographs document two facing sides of a street in the new Stevenson Ranch housing development in 1995, and the same street in 1996, a year later.