“Local 909er”
A film, a website and photographs about the Inland Empire
Project Director: Enid Baxter Blader
Documenting changes in Inland Empire cities
In the last year, more people have moved to the Inland Empire than to anywhere else in the country. Housing developments, planned and gated communities are its new crops, rapidly replacing vacant orange groves, fallow vineyards, cow fields, train yards and rock mines. Once a rural area, where acres of vineyards and orange groves were part of the landscape, the Inland Empire has become a “burbopolis.” Mega-malls, giant box stores, acres of asphalt, and yardless ‘mcmansions” suddenly characterize a region once popularly referred to as “just so much dirt.” Using film, photographs and a website, Enid Baxter Blader has documented the changes transforming the region.
Artist and filmmaker Enid Baxter Blader spent four years making the “Local 909er" film. "Basically, what we did was shoot every weekend to see what was coming up and what was coming down,” Blader said. “Local 909er" was screened at the 2007 Los Angeles Fair as part of Fair Exchange, a group exhibition by 28 Los Angeles-based artists and artist collectives. In a catalogue accompanying the exhibit, Getty Museum Curator Glenn Phillips wrote: “Enid Baxter Blader … grew up in a rural mining town near the Pennsylvania and New Jersey state line, and her work in film and video, drawing and painting presents a seamless melding of rural sensibility and vanguard formalism. Blader finds echoes of her own upbringing everywhere she goes; in her film 'Local 909er,' she follows six local narratives as she examines the rapid development and suburbanization of the Inland Empire, an area that was, until recently, decidedly rural.”
