Good Mourning California

Seventeenth-century European explorers imagined California to be an island; in Solomon's view, the Golden State today is an oasis of myths and illusions. Spliced together with her own images of highways, the Marlboro Man, painted maps, conceptualist doodles and photomontages, her reflective free-form essay presents the California dream as a triumph of the synthetic, a narcissistic haven where ``everyone writes their own myths,'' where originality is passe and ``freedom is being free to conform.'' A California artist and architect, Solomon ( Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden ) here provides a social topology of gardens, from San Franciscans' backyard vegetable patches to the golf-course-sized lawns of conservative Republicans. She examines the racist and jingoist underpinnings of westward-moving Americans' myth of Manifest Destiny, then looks at California's new wave of Asian and Latino immigrants, squeezed in a state where ``poverty has always been a sin.'' A disturbing, provocative collage. (Oct.)