shoulders & swales

2019, oil paintings on canvas

Following a study on the subject of infrastructural investments in settler colonial states, these paintings were created from a collection of photographs and film stills taken from out the passenger-side window. They are an examination into the landscape vocabulary of the mundane that J.B. Jackson explored in photographs and in writing during his travels in the mid-20th century.

In rendering this fleeting view of a passing oversized trailer in oil paint, I intended to elongate and flatten an image that is normally viewed at high speed. The spaces rendered are imaginings of those roadside shoulder patches of grass and trees that line vast stretches of the interstate highways. These boundary-spaces are designed to give the illusion of density and are often used as both visual and auditory buffer zones.