The city has long been a subject for artists seeking to capture the experience of the urban landscape, yet Doug Aitken differentiates his work by utilizing the industrial materials of the very realm he explores. Through shooting this aerial photograph of Los Angeles at night from a helicopter and mounting his transparency onto an LED lightbox, Aitken explores installation and photography and how they converge in Rise, 1998-2001. Aitken’s fabricated scenery has a cinematic quality, appearing almost other-worldly in its juxtaposition of the glowing night sky and the darkness left unlit. Aitken situates the current lot within its urban context through placing an emphasis on the mechanical. Aitken evokes the mood of the city by assimilating his photography into the city’s vernacular through the use of the lightbox, reminiscent of glowing signage, bright city lights, and advertising. Through this interplay of form and function, the city is literally and metaphorically illuminated.

A predecessor to Iwan Baan’s The City and the Storm, the current lot emphasizes illumination rather than darkness, all the while creating a similar study in contrasts highlighting where the lights begin and end. With its galaxy of twinkling lights, the current lot draws comparisons to Ed Ruscha’s City Lights series of paintings, where grids of bright spots on dark backgrounds suggest aerial views of the city at night. Aitken’s technique of projection allows the lights depicted in the image of Los Angeles at night to brighten their surroundings as they do in reality.