This well groomed, zen-ish, high-desert landscape is on an out-of-the-way corner of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power headquarters between their employee parking and the 101 South on-ramp, on the corner of Temple and Hope streets. It is composed of sand, plant life, and several 200-million year old boulders transplanted from the Owens Valley in southeastern California.
This mini marginalized landscape, displaced in time and space, evokes the parallel reconfiguration of ecology and social order by DWP's water grab and subsequent damming of the Owens River Valley, in the first decades of the 20th century, in order to secure the water supply for its growing metropolis.
As a consequence Owens Valley has been transformed into a dry alkali flat, and its indigenous and local population forced to wage an unsuccessful water war with the city; one of the longest running battles over water rights in the West. Famously, this history was a source of inspiration for Roman Polanski's 1974 film "Chinatown".
Like a Soviet imperialist sculpture in the center of Berlin, L.A.'s sister city, the Owens Valley Landscape Garden is a message to the natural habitat: We Own You.
