Columbia is a perfectly restored Gold Rush town. In fact, it looks a bit too perfect. Every image I made of its old buildings looked like post card views. To overcome this issue, I searched for ways to abstract the town so that we could look into the past without seeing the present. As I walked Columbia’s streets, I noticed that many of the windows in the restored 19th century buildings were original – the glass produced wavy reflections. I then focused my attention on those wavy reflections until I found one that best characterized the Gold Rush era. This image was the result – an abstracted vision of softly focused and slightly distorted buildings and gardens carrying us back into time itself.