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March 06-08, 2025

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Landfill: Elegy for the Santa Maria Valley

Friday, October 07 - 2:15PM to 3:05PM
Caprice 1

"Plastic represents the promises of modernity: the promise of sealed, perfected, clean smooth abundance. It encapsulates the fantasy of ridding ourselves of the dirt of the world, of decay, of malfeasance."


-Heather Davis, "Life and Death in the Anthropocene" (2015)


I started making photographs in the Santa Maria Valley in 2013 after I was introduced to the area by my former father-in-law who worked for a company that collected soil that had been polluted by oil. The lands transformation is visible, for now, but like all things we have no further use for, it will disappear from sight…


Addressing the current, human-centered epoch, my book Landfill examines the connection between how land is used and regarded. The Santa Maria landscape reveals who we are by showing how the earth supports our food needs on a massive scale, fueling a cyclical engine of consumption, waste, and renewal.

speaker

Brett Kallusky
Brett Kallusky

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