Addressing the issues
As with many young people at the time, Plumb was wrestling with the unrealised, idealistic aspirations of the previous two decades, becoming increasingly radicalised by what she was witnessing in her community and beyond. “I felt like capitalism’s need for instant profits didn’t address issues such as climate change or poverty,” she explains. “I wanted to make work about that. But I didn’t want to do it in any sort of obvious way.”
The pictures in The Golden City are not documentary in nature, which one might expect from work questioning society’s maladies. Instead, Plumb’s deep-seated anxiety and dread around these unaddressed problems are reflected in her often-unsettling subjects and a distinctive aesthetic of unease, thoughtfully edited and sequenced to ominous effect in The Golden City.
Burned-out cars and buildings, mountains of detritus, high-rises mid-demolition, emptied freeways, graffiti-laden walls, abandoned schools, and lone figures populate Plumb’s The Golden City. Similar to Evidence (1977), an influential project by her mentor Larry Sultan and his collaborator Mike Mandel, many of the pictures in The Golden City are enigmatic, inviting conjecture and eschewing certainty. What, for instance, are the trio of young people squeezed onto the floral sofa quaintly stationed atop a roof staring at beyond the picture’s frame? And where is the infant that one would expect in the rolling baby chair? Or what is a solitary billboard, emblazoned with Grant Wood’s iconic American Gothic, advertising amidst a desolate lot?
Many of these pictures also evoke the work in Henry Wessel’s Incidents (2013), moments drawn from everyday life that subtly unsettle as one closely surveys the scenes. Plumb’s distinctive aesthetic approach and framing of the world further imbue her subjects with a psychological intensity, together creating a disquieting tension that compels sustained, curious looking. Even the most innocuous scenes – a construction site, a woman laying outside on a blanket, a teenager lost in thought on a stool – are rendered uncanny through Plumb’s lens. Her striking, nighttime portraits in The Golden City, where fill flash is regularly used to dramatic, eerie effect, most acutely demonstrate this surrealism.