Dave Alsobrooks

Highway One

I’ll be installing Highway One in Raleigh, NC in late September as part of Made in the USA (site offline). Here’s a peek at the installation in the abandoned furniture warehouse. That’s an antique church pew for seating and the images will be projected onto an old blue tarp which has been painted white.

Here’s a video file of the slide show complete with audio.

Sequence 1

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Highway One began as a recommendation. A recommendation to take the scenic route. In this particular case, I was traveling to Columbia, SC in order to hang a few paintings. I took the wrong way initially, but managed to heed the recommendation on my return voyage.

Along my new path I was overcome by a sense of isolation. Or, at least, loneliness. I’d been here before, but now I found myself in a sea of the artifacts of other people: bicycles, refrigerators, churches, nightclubs, lawnmowers and phone booths. Eerily enough, no people were around to claim them. A month later, I made a return trip to Columbia. This time, I took my camera and documented the day-long voyage in about 200 photographs. Approximately half of these images form the foundation of the Highway One installation.

Certainly more than visual stimulation contributed to my original feelings of loneliness along the route from outside Cheraw to Columbia, so I’m also incorporating ambient sound taken on location into the installation. The image quality is desaturated and reminiscent of aged photographs with selective color halftones and film grain. The air was oppressively hot and humid during my trips and these washed out projections convey an almost weary resistance to withering away. My memories of the trip play hazily through my mind when recalled. On an opposite wall, approximately 50 prints will hang in a large grouping, allowing for closer inspection of many of the images. Viewers will populate the projected images as anonymous silhouettes while moving in and out of the path of the projections. These anonymous visitors will be bathed in the images and establish a link between the present and the lonely locales of Highway One. An antique church pew is the only seating in the room. Churches are basically the primary landmarks along the route and the pew lends a sense of reverence to the imagery. The installation seeks to find beauty in the mundane, reflect the fleeting memories of forgotten places and point out the constant plodding of our human race towards an unknown future through projected imagery and ambient sound captured on location.

The installation includes:
·    projected images
·     ambient sound
·     approximately fifty 5 x 7 varnished prints on Strathmore watercolor paper
·     1 antique church pew or comparable seating
·     variable dimensions

If you’d like to see the complete Highway One image set over on Flickr, click here.

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I was recently asked to hang some prints based upon the installation. I made prints on archival Strathmore and Arches papers, varnished them and then fixed them to larger pieces of paper. Next I applied a custom wax seal and hand stamping. These were finished with hand numbering and signature. I’m doing these prints in editions of five — each print sells for $75. The price includes shipping. Use the Flickr link to shop ‘em and send me a note if you’d like to purchase a print.