Jamison Edgar

Jamison Edgar (they/them) is a queer Southerner living on stolen Tongva/Kizh/Chumash land. As a visual artist, writer, and curator, Edgar facilitates cross-disciplinary projects of spectacular defiance and radical exuberance. Their archive-oriented art practice abstracts historical records and sculpts cultural memories to expose the complex machinery behind equity, visibility, and suppression technologies. Their most recent projects survey the invaluable role queer/trans, Black, brown, and indigenous communities play in shaping post-human imaginaries.

The installation's themes revolve around the strange history of Mexican/America Palm Trees — the first "celebrities" of Southern California — and how these sibling species have become fracturing symbols of immigration, labor, and spectacle on the LA landscape. After the US annexed this land from Mexico, palms were sent throughout the US to advertise the (white) oasis that was California. The installation draws upon the cognitive dissonance embedded within the flora's urban history. It juxtaposes these histories with the fact that many of the palms throughout the city are reaching the end of their lives. In making this work, I want to pull back the political and poetic layers that we use to understand Los Angeles and interrogate the symbols that still hold social and ecological power in our daily lives.