Avoid Highways

There are places that are not fixed at a particular geographical location, but are instead visited experientially, through time and movement: an oft-travelled route through the city, a walk to a lover’s home or a favored path in the forest. Our thoughts and memories of these places often take on an emotional or sensory form. The entirety of the experience is what we tend to remember, not just one particular scene.

‘Avoid Highways’ is a series of works that capture a visual impression of such places. It’s a project about immediacy, the result of a practice of cultivating presence through movement and embracing a slower, more deliberate way of experiencing our surroundings.

The source material for these works are minute-by-minute photographs collected during intentional walks through places of personal significance. Each work contains the visual content of roughly one hundred individual views that have been combined mathematically. The final image is the result of averaging the brightness and tone of these many photographs, pixel by pixel, into a single visual composite. The process itself is photographic and literal, but the result is a form of abstraction, like memory, created by a combination of algorithm, time, intention and visual excess.