From
2011 to 2017 I traveled over 100,000 miles by car, focusing my camera on the
massive network of superhighways that has become ubiquitous throughout the
United States. Whether located within an urban environment or leading out to
the last remnants of wilderness, these roadways have been designed to suppress
any distinguishing characteristics of place and instead construct a familiar
and uniform system of functional spaces built for mobility and productivity.
Rather than moving quickly through these spaces however, I have made the
decision to slowly and deliberately dwell within them, looking for unforeseen
moments of humor, pathos and humanity.
My
photographs look at the road as a stage where narratives play out and opposing
forces often collide. The boundaries that line these landscapes, whether real
or imagined, are examined by looking at the separations between public and
private space, privilege and need, the individual and the collective, and the
countervailing ideas of home and escape. The resulting compilation of
photographs depicts the state of America’s infrastructure as a cultural
indicator of its economic, social and environmental circumstances.
Image Captions (from top to bottom)
1. Page,
Arizona, 2013
2. Interstate
75, near Lenox, Georgia, 2014
3. Interstate
5, near Grapevine, California, 2014
4. Interstate
26, near Mars Hill, North Carolina, 2013
4. Parkton,
Maryland, 2005
6. Interstate
70, near Salina, Kansas, 2014
7. Barstow,
California, 2017
8. Interstate
81, near Woodstock, Virginia, 2012
9.. U.S.
Highway 80, between Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, 2015
10. Green
River, Wyoming, 2013
11. Interstate
83, Baltimore, Maryland, 2014
12. U.S.
Highway 85 and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, from El Paso, Texas, 2016
book - Joshua is currently crowdfunding to publish this series as a photobook, published by Kehrer Verlag. Please consider supporting this fantastic project… it promises to be one of the photobooks of the year!
“I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of THE YEARS
The Black on Gray paintings were Rothko’s final series. Like the Brown and Gray works on paper, color has been extracted to a dark upper and a lighter lower section. Most striking is the painted white edge within which the composition is circumscribed. In all of Rothko’s earlier work the edges of his paintings folding around the stretcher had been meticulously painted. In marked contrast, the white surround of the Black on Gray paintings sharply demarcates the painted surface and collapses the pictorial space into a much flatter picture plane.
Previously, Rothko had used a mixture of rabbitskin glue and pigment to douse his canvases in a first layer of colour. The Black on Gray paintings, however, were primed with white gesso which shows through in various areas, further contravening any illusion of pictorial depth. Unlike the Brown and Grays, where the variations occur within a fixed format, the Black on Gray paintings substantially vary in size and orientation, each offering a completely unique exploration of scale and ‘weight’.
The Black on Gray paintings bear witness to the tireless effort with which Rothko kept pushing the boundaries of his practice; which may also explain why one evening in late 1969 he opened his studio to select members of the New York art world to view his latest paintings, the first and only time he presented a series as such.
