One Work: Janelle Iglesias
PALM READING, 2022, mixed-media with scavenged palm tree parts, installation at the La Jolla Historical Society, La Jolla, CA, all photos by Philipp Scholz Rittermann
[Image description: A geometric structure made of light-colored wood installed in a room with white walls and sunlight flooding onto the wood floor. Five different palm tree parts are affixed to various points on the structure.]
In installations that range from minimal presentations to intricate structures, Janelle Iglesias probes the relationship among humans, the natural environment, and our contemporary consumer world. She uses found natural and human-made materials local to each project’s site to uncover the particular ways in which objects carry memory. Breaking down the systems— such as archives and collections— that constitute public history, Iglesias’s work uncovers the often unrecognized assumptions we hold: ones shaped, at the most fundamental level, by settler colonialism and capitalism. By sensitively re-cataloguing materials, Iglesias seeks to, “in some small way,” she says, “build our world anew.” PALM READING, created for an exhibition at the La Jolla Historical Society in 2022, exemplifies the ways in which this thoughtful approach manifests in work that is simultaneously visually spare and lush with meaning.
PALM READING, 2022, mixed-media with scavenged palm tree parts
[Image description: A side-view of the installation. Bright sunlight floods through two windows on the back wall.]
Born and raised in Queens, New York, Iglesias moved to San Diego in 2016. Upon arriving, she became fascinated by the palm tree, one of Southern California’s most potent symbols. With PALM READING, she unpacks the tangled meaning the plant has accrued since it first came to the area. Contrary to popular assumption, only one palm species is native to California: the Washingtonia filifera, which originally grew only in the Colorado Desert, one hundred and fifty miles away from La Jolla. All other palm species around Southern California were imported, first by Spanish missionaries who arrived in the eighteenth century. Lore says that one early species of imported palm was planted by Father Junípero Serra himself. The Franciscan priest founded the first mission in California, and so the Serra Palm serves as a symbol for Spanish colonization of the Alta California region and, ultimately, the genocide of many of the Indigenous people who lived there. Yet since palms were planted widely around the turn of the twentieth century, the tree has come to signal Southern California as a site of utopian fantasy.
PALM READING (detail), 2022, mixed-media with scavenged palm tree parts
[Image description: A closeup shot of three palm parts affixed to the wooden structure.]
Iglesias’s research in the La Jolla Historical Society’s archive surfaced a wide array of palm tree images. The palm appears with its classic, sunny aura in materials such as postcards, photographs, and newspaper articles. Iglesias also found more unexpected images that expose the palm tree’s reality: laid out like logs in a shopping center parking lot, mature palms being airlifted by helicopter into downtown La Jolla, laborers digging precise square holes in the ground to prepare for planting. These scenes suggest the cost and extreme labor behind the perfect rows of trees reflected in the former images, the trees that residents and visitors alike assume have always grown there.
PALM READING (detail), 2022, mixed-media with scavenged palm tree parts
[Image description: A closeup shot of two palm parts affixed to the wooden structure.]
For PALM READING, Iglesias gathered pieces of palm that had dropped to the ground. Divorced from the context of the whole tree, the individual parts become like Modernist sculpture, pared down to their essential, elegant form. Taking this transformation as a point of departure, Iglesias built a gridded wood frame for the tree parts. The strict structure nods to the architectural Modernism that maintains a strong presence in La Jolla, most prominently in Louis Kahn’s famed design for the Salk Institute but ranging across public buildings and private homes. Developed during the first half of the twentieth century in Europe and the United States, Modernism eschewed ornamentation in favor of minimalism, focusing on a rational use of materials to reveal a structure’s “truth.” With natural elements placed in a literal Modernist framework, Iglesias’s installation exposes the affectation inherent in the highly constructed, utopian vision that shaped La Jolla, and continues to bolster the town’s image today.
—Elizabeth Rooklidge, independent curator and Editor of HereIn
Image from the La Jolla Historical Society archive
[Image description: A sepia-toned photograph of a small-town street lined with palm trees. Two early automobiles are parked in front of a tavern and a cafe.]
Image from the La Jolla Historical Society archive
[Image description: A black and white photograph of an ocean shore and horizon. Palm trees line the street at the image’s bottom edge, their shadows falling on their grass behind them.]
Image from the La Jolla Historical Society archive
[Image description: A color postcard with an illustration of a palm tree-lined street, the ocean visible behind it. Black text at the bottom of the image reads, “A Typical Southern California Shoreline Drive.”
Image from the La Jolla Historical Society archive
[Image description: A black and white photograph of a row of palm trees laid in a row on the ground in an industrial park. A figure bends over one of the palm trees.]
Image from the La Jolla Historical Society archive
[Image description: A black and white photo of a palm tree being lowered by helicopter into an office courtyard. A figure stands in the courtyard to direct the palm tree’s placement.]
Image from the La Jolla Historical Society archive
[Image description: A black and white photograph of a figure holding a jackhammer, standing in a square hole dug in the dirt. A palm tree trunk is visible in the background.]
Image from the La Jolla Historical Society archive
[Image description: A black and white photograph of four workers planting palm trees in front of a white building. Two of the figures stand in a deep square hole in the ground, one with a jackhammer and the other a shovel.]
Image from the La Jolla Historical Society archive
[Image description: A postcard with a color photograph of a row of palm trees in front of the ocean. In the upper right of the image, a 1980s-style font spells “La Jolla” in red.]