The ‘Jesusita Summerland’ series depicts the debris and damage caused to the residents of Santa Barbara from Wildfires. In a time of economic chaos, these kinds of environmental events serve to remind us of natures force and how easily our systems can collapse. The fires destroyed the homes of some of America’s wealthiest citizens, indifferent to class. The scorched landscape provides little evidence of the good life of this once gated community, but what developed is a new exclusive group – bound together in a shared sense of loss, coining the phase ‘California’s Poorest Millionaires’.
The submitted works are selected from over 75 images currently being compiled for a book. This body of work is part of my continued interest in landscapes which experience transformation through the struggle between man and nature and the invisible boundaries it forms.
Biography in paragraph form:
32 year old, British Artist Ali Richards has been awarded several prizes for her photographic observations, amongst the most recent being included as part of the Emerging Artist Award with Magenta Publishing. Much of her recent work has been completed during residencies and fellowship positions abroad, working within isolated communities. Richards is currently working on projects at home in the UK.
Recent exhibitions of her work include ‘Siege’ at the Kala Gallery in Berkeley, California and inclusions in the Hereford Photography Festival in the UK and the Flash Forward Festival 2010 in Toronto, Canada. Her work has been published and reviewed in many European magazines and was recently auctioned at Daniel Cooney Fine Art NY.
