Scenic Route

The dream of the road-trip is a deep part of the North American psyche. It comes from a yearning for unlimited mobility and the notions of exploration and the conquerable frontier. The narrative is to be free, to see what’s out there and go where the road takes you.

Moving through a landscape in a car may be compared to watching a film. The windshield is the frame through which image after image pass and create the moving landscape. The view is unending but each point is fleeting. The tension between keeping one’s eyes on the road and the desire to look at the scenery whizzing by is palpable. The landscape becomes either a glimpse or an unending blur.

It is not only to replenish fuel that the road-trip is periodically interrupted, it is also paused to scrub away the annoyance, the evidence, the bugs on the windshield. Insects are helpless victims of the speeding car. Their exploded bodies accumulate and eventually obscure the view of the landscape. SCENIC ROUTE aims to temporarily syncopate the deep-seated narrative of the road-trip. Death frustrates the desire to see the landscape and the road’s shift in locality, and gradual destruction, encourage conflicting experiences of the installation.