With this new body of work, McPhee continues her exploration of the synchronicity between natural disaster and human trauma using the tiny coastal town of La Conchita. This community, just north of Los Angeles on Highway 1/101, is built on an ancient mudslide and has been subject to periodic massive debris flows. The most recent, in 2005, took ten lives and left a huge mass of fallen mountain on the town. Yet the inhabitants continue to stay, despite the inevitable recurrence of this threat. La Conchita remaps the problematic of living with disaster in California in immediate, raw terms, since the trauma is always already here. People can’t or won’t leave. They can’t sell their houses and place hope that the hillside can be stabilized, though the geologic surveys suggest otherwise. Global warming appears to be accelerating the danger.

For the past 18 months, McPhee has been visiting La Conchita, taking photographs of the disaster’s vernacular shrines to the dead on the site of the mudslide—chain link barriers a rubble of mud, destroyed house frames, roofs, retaining walls, play yards, swing sets and crushed cars. She also creates drawings based on the trajectory of the debris flow, as well as taking video and performing spontaneous personal rituals in the geography. These are all intermixed to form a visual memory of present trauma. McPhee does not approach La Conchita as a documentarian, but creates a new context that hovers between objective and subjective interpretation.

Artist and theorist G.H. Hovagimyan has stated that McPhee has updated the work of Ana Mendieta into the realm of new media. “I love what Christina McPhee does,” he states. “She uses digital tools and scientific data to get to a deeply human emotion. Philosophers say all digital media is alienating. Both Christina, like Christophe Bruno, uses those tools to humanize.”