TRANS-FORMATION video by Pascale Lafay

In conjunction with the historical exhibition Pioneers and Entrepreneurs, FLAX commissioned French photographer and video artist Pascale Lafay to create a video of Los Angeles today with its French legacy as a thematic backdrop.

For this project, Lafay was invited to spend 3 weeks in Los Angeles discovering and filming the city. The result is a 20 minute video that presents an ongoing dialogue between past and present, reality and fantasy: an artist’s vision on exile, discovery, change and identity.

In TRANS-Formation, Lafay uses a camera phone, digital camera and HD video camera to create a visual poem distilling her impressions of the unique urban organism that is “L.A”. This rumination on exile, discovery, change and identity documents her journey from Paris to Los Angeles and maps her own discovery of the city as she retraces the steps of French pioneers and seeks out their present-day legacy.

As French art critic Damien Sausset has noted, Lafay’s particular search to portray an environment and its emotional impact “is similar to a subtle written work in which her topics would be the essential subjects of our environment.”