deankessmann

Interstate Landscapes

archival pigment prints, 12 x 15 inches (image), 13 x 19 inches (paper), 2003
edition of 3 with 1 AP
archival pigment prints
12 x 15 inches (image)
13 x 19 inches (paper), 2003
edition of 3 with 1 AP

Read a short description of this project

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Interstate Landscapes

I’m not sure when I became so enamored with the landscape that exists alongside of the interstate highways in Missouri and Illinois, but I do know that I feel intimately familiar with it and connected to it. I appreciate and respond to the wide-open spaces that are divided by a razor-sharp line, the part of the country that seems to be one-half earth and one-half sky. Unlike the dramatic landscapes that exist in other parts of the United States, a moving car may very well be the best vantage point from which to appreciate the restrained terrain of the Midwest—the speed magnifies the monotony, makes mountains out of molehills. What initially inspired me to make the images in Interstate Landscapes was my fascination with the patches and strips of native grasses that I began to notice along the interstate highways. I had watched these grasses grow and change with the seasons from my car for years before pulling over to the side of the road to step into those blurry scenes. Throughout this time, I also watched the areas beyond the patches of grass become more and more developed. In some places, the landscape that I knew as a child had been radically changed. This work describes the subtle topography of Illinois and Missouri, the nondescript places that I had looked at and been surrounded by my entire life up to that time. The images in this series are my attempts to capture the stillness—to record the quotidian, sometimes prosaic, other times lyrical and mesmerizing, mid-western landscape.