Jennifer West’s Future Forgetting at JOAN Los Angeles is a homecoming exhibition for the native L.A. artist that sees her turning her lens on the city itself, bringing her ongoing exploration of the materiality of film to bear on matters of memory, place, and preservation. Each piece of Future Forgetting draws inspiration and figurative or literal material from the Los Angeles River, the concrete-encased waterway that curls through the notoriously heterogeneous quarters of the city in a circuitous comma, connecting the disparate parts of L.A. like independent clauses of a sentence. Future Forgetting uses the physical texture of film to describe Los Angeles as both a place and an image at once–an unstable construction that erodes and replenishes with time’s ebb and flow.

The artist is offering previews of her films: 6th Street Bridge Film and Archaeology of Smashed Flatscreen Televisions Thrown off Bridges.The show runs until April 11, 2020 and is by appointment only.