Hollywood Stories

Hollywood Stories was inspired by the book LA: Artland. In the introductory chapter, a writer describes a walk around Hollywood. It gives insight into the great diversity of wealth, background and aspiration that exists in Hollywood. Something that fascinated me is how Hollywood has this image that people instantly recognize; in our minds it is full of movie stars, blond-haired, white track-suited women with minks small dogs driving pastel convertibles and living behind large, ornate gates. It’s image is extremely consistent to the world. But in person, Hollywood is something else entirely. It is a place of great wealth and glamour for sure, but it is also a place where poor people live (and everyone in between). It is just as run down and broken as it is polished and ornate. I am fascinated by how an area of such varied people, places, sights and sounds comes together to form a singular image for the world. This is what I intended to explore.
In this project, I laid out portions of text from the introductory chapter on individual strips of transparent paper. I recorded people’s stories verbatim and drew images of places and objects that they mentioned. When placed on top of each other, these pieces form the iconic image of the Hollywood sign. The whole thing is a visual equivalent to the concept I observed in LA: Artland.