Boom and Bust: Ruins of the California Dream

Elizabeth Hemphill
Visual Studies
UC Irvine

This project interrogated the notion of the dream of California as a land of plenty including that of ore, agriculture, and tourism, through various ruinous sites, particularly mining ghost towns and more contemporary spaces such as the former resort communities that dot the shores of the Salton Sea. Simultaneously, this project investigated and problematized the idea of the contemporary ghost town and the contemporary ruin. Both mining-era ghost towns and the Salton Sea area, ghost towns‚ are ruinous sites of the California dream, that the land keeps on giving.