Lloyd Ruocco’s mid-century “Phantom Architecture” resisted spectacle in favor of intimacy and environmental attunement.

Text by JenMarie Landig Archival Photos Courtesy of Todd Pitman / Lloyd Ruocco Archive and The Huntington

The blurring of boundaries between interior and exterior space is hardly unique to San Diego, though it was that city’s foremost mid-century architectural critic, James Britton II, who coined the term “Phantom Architecture” to describe this phenomenon—specifically in relation to the designs of architect Lloyd Ruocco (1907 - 1981). Characterized by the use of reflective glass and post-and-beam construction to evoke spaciousness, Phantom Architecture refers to a style…

Multidisciplinary artists JenMarie Landig and Maha Bazzari present Light Made Visible, a new mixed-media exhibition. JenMarie’s photography and Maha’s paintings come together to create contrast, lines, and form using the camera lens and paint brush. These elements…

Shedding Light on the Self and the Collective is a comprehensive presentation of JenMarie Landig’s work, illustrating her distinctive practice across media, including: photography, video, movement, and mindfulness. 

The photography and video installation exhibition centers representations of the self, connection, and community by shedding light on the illusion of a separate self. When the seemingly isolated self creates sources of support, solace, and celebration via connection to others, then one becomes...

The play The 39 Steps provides viewers with the seemingly timeless need for respite and escape in moments of great despair.

In the accompanying exhibition of photographs by multi-disciplinary artist JenMarie Landig, dark forces, at the individual and compositional level, are similarly investigated. Just as the play’s characters adopt various roles, often in order to deceive others, Landig's photographs consider…

My latest article, “Framing Light,” is a contemplation of light and all its permutations. I explore forms of light, their associations, and light’s interplay with gravity: a light lived in the dark and lit by the moon, hospital lights and the heaviness of grief, light that enlightens, and the lightness of a lifted burden, community, dream space, and meandering thoughts.

This article is for everyone who has experienced a loss — of a loved one, of a job, of a dream. While these experiences feel dark, and mainstream society encourages us to lighten up as soon as possible, instead we must first surrender to gravity’s pull into slowness, stillness, darkness, not knowing, and rest. This process allows new shapes to form inside of us, and, paradoxically, offers a path back to lightness. It is in this way that we experience...

In the contemporary age of the “selfie,” audiences are provided exponential access to self-authored portraits. While the selfie is inherently replaceable and even disposable…

My multi-disciplinary artistic practice is grounded in photography, writing, movement, performance, and community. As a California artist, signals of sun, sky, ocean, and freeways inform my body of…

I once stood in a river that covered nearly two million acres: a giant, beautiful, slow-moving river, otherwise known as the Everglades in southern Florida. A vanishingly…

The image of my face, hazy yet mouth in sharp focus, came to me while I was meditating. When I opened my mouth, out flew a flock of black birds. The birds took flight, even as my heart was sinking. I drove into…

“You might want to reach out and disturb a pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world.” Before the pigment can stain my fingers, I must be first willing…

For over a decade I have been selecting a Word of the Year (WOTY) as an annual framework of intention, a modality of being under deep consideration. Or, as often happens, as a point of departure to see where…