Artist Veronica Graham’s print Before The Lake There Was Swamp is an abstracted double vision of Lake Merritt and the surrounding landscape. The lower half depicts the lake (Lake Peralta or San Antonio Slough as it would have been known prior to 1867) and environs before European settlers arrived. The upper half is a depiction of the lake today, with its red artificial structures superimposed on the landscape. Look closely and you’ll notice too the diminished and reshaped natural elements affected by human intrusion.
But Graham’s comparison is not an indictment or value judgment. The title betrays a certain amount of ambivalence toward the past. And her approach to representation, using graphic symbols as a basis for pattern making, has a dispassionate quality as though simply registering the change that has occurred over the last 200 years. Of course her images are not accurate with regard to data, instead they show the landscape as a shifting collection of interlocking forms and symbols—as a pattern language.
Printed by Idiot Or Genius? with water-based inks on archival cover-weight paper in an edition of 50.