Traffic as art?

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I don’t know about you, but the last thing I think about when sitting in the middle of a traffic jam is art. Yet architecture photographer Benny Chan’s ‘Traffic’ exhibit at the Pasadena Museum of California Art through Sept. 20 may make me rethink the whole car-in-traffic experience. Over the last few years, Chan has snapped aerial views of Los Angeles-area freeways during the height of the rush hour with an enormous camera he designed exclusively for the project in order to create monumental-sized prints of the chaotic scenes. But freeways and their tiny specks of cars — undoubtedly filled with road-rage drivers — when seen from Chan’s bird’s-eye-view morph into a serene, artful urbanscape.

Next time I’m stuck at the four-level interchange and ready to scream, I’ll try to recall what my car looks like from above, then take a deep breath and chant ‘om.’ www.pmcaonline.org.

—Barbara Thornburg