Where After the Valley? unfolded around the grotesque relic of a shark, the first four feet of a once‑twenty‑foot body: a monumental head, sheared and emptied, offered up like a sacrifice. On the slippery concrete riverbed, it could easily roll and pivot. Kids loved it.

 Hauled from the San Fernando Valley’s psychic terrain—where the American dream curdled into foreclosure, porn sets, the military-industrial complex HQ,  street gangs and endless strip malls—the animal appeared as both victim and emissary, a creature that had joined the long, annual descent of human detritus down the concrete sluice of the LA River, finally claimed by something more relentless: us.

Across the flow, four gallery “walls” appeared in a single planar run, not enclosing a room but sketching the ghost of one: a continuous façade hovering an inch above the waterline, so that the perceived floor seemed to slide out from under you, as if the architecture of safety itself were being eroded and carried to sea. This thin, rectilinear brace of white surfaces—sanctioned by official permissions, yet impossibly precarious—gave the scene the uneasy clarity of an outdoor showroom, a site‑specific installation that reimagined the river as both corridor and drain. On these walls, plein‑air paintings of the shark in the riverbed recast the corpse as a motif of landscape, almost serene in its repetition, even as the real, partial body below insisted that what the Valley sends down its concrete pipeline each year is not just flushing out the Valley's sins with water and trash, but a whole ecology of hunger, fantasy, and collapse.