Aurora Tang is a curator and researcher working at the intersections of Land Art’s legacy and site-specific installation, architectural criticism, history, photography, and the imperative of ground-truthing. (The term, borrowed from geography, means simply knowing places through firsthand experience of them.) Since 2009, she has worked for The Center for Land Use Interpretation, an organization that exemplifies all of the above, and is nearing its third decade of operation. Here, Tang discusses the multivalence of her work in land use phenomenology and education, the freedom of research, the significance of rephotography, and approaching landscape as readymade.

Last fall I met the artist Drew Heitzler in front of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) headquarters on Venice Boulevard in Culver City, where we boarded a sightseeing tour bus and settled in for a day of exploring the largest oil field in America: Los Angeles.