North is West / South is East: 32 Maps of Los Angeles, 2002
Book, edition of 1000

North is West / South is East is organized around a series of drawings collected from strangers I approached at Los Angeles International Airport and asked to make maps of LA. Around half were drawn by people who actually live in Southern California. These tend to trace commutes, diagram neighborhoods, and mark the locations of events and environments significant in the lives of their makers. The rest were made by visitors from all over the world — Australia, Mexico, Hungary, New Jersey. These start to picture the idea of a Los Angeles that precedes it: palm trees and traffic, surfers and freeways, Baywatch, money and grids. Taken together these chance encounters begin to describe a place at once real and imagined. And in drawing from the generosity of strangers at LAX, the project hopes to disturb the instrumental logic of the airport, itself a non-place, where the only reason you visit is to get yourself somewhere else.