Lisa Sanditz’s contemporary landscape paintings focus on the magnificence of desecrated land as a reflection of contemporary culture and the economy. Stating, “I am equally engaged by what is beautiful and what is degraded,” Sanditz explores locations that contain visual elements ripe for painterly interpretation. From 2007-08, she created a series that examined the consumer-based relationship between China and the United States, surveying the phenomenon of single-commodity towns in China. Christmas for Export (2007), for example, features a wasteland of red Christmas baubles amidst a desolate gray city. More recently, Sanditz has focused her painting on political hotspots within her own country, in works such as The Silverlake Reservoir (2010), which depicts a Los Angeles reservoir that was filled with 400,000 black balls to prevent sunlight from stimulating the growth of carcinogenic materials in the water.