ACRE, a residency program and exhibition space, invited curator Kate Bowen to work with myself, Dan Luedtke, and Nick Lally on an exhibition in their gallery. It was a pleasure to work together on an exhibition, creating individual projects but considering how they functioned together. Curator Kate Bowen wrote about our work:

From Ulysses to Kerouac the road trip, or quest, is well-established theme that spans world culture. A road trip offers a process that can provide redemption, transformation, and understanding. As a formal device the road trip presents time laid out in a straight line. This conceit keeps a narrative continually moving forward with no character left unchanged by the events that take place between points A and B. The destination is therefore also the resolution, the site of fulfillment after the long journey. However, it is the journey, its tireless momentum, its intense but uneasy relationships that are created as a curious visitor, and its necessary return to the starting point, that contains the events and experiences that allow for meaningful understanding. 

Katie Hargrave, Daniel Luedtke, and Nick Lally create works that explore the road trip as a romantic, fractured, and anxious experience in their exhibition Edit Road Movie. The exhibition interrogates the peddlers and iconic byproducts of the road trip trope, focusing on the journey as a limbo. The work considers the aesthetics of the search and the journey rather than the experience of achieving fulfillment at the destination. For example, Katie Hargrave uses the audiobook narration of Kerouac’s On The Road and edits it to feature only the underlined passages in five found copies of the novel. This narration creates a backdrop for the rest of the exhibition of evocative prose, which now divorced from its context and story languishes in idling desires for transformation. Similarly, Daniel Luedtke creates a compilation of establishing shots from the beginning of action and horror movies with a road trip theme. With the majority of the image removed the video presents only the edges of the frame giving a glimpse of a continually panning lens that moves over a multitude of changing landscapes. The video cuts from one scene to the next never resting long enough to find a recognizable character or a place for the viewer to enter. The music from each scene is caught in a constant low crescendo providing an anticipatory soundtrack under Kerouac’s disconnected philosophies. The anxiety and excitement of perpetual momentum in Luedtke’s piece is further explored in Nick Lally’s video that presents the journey between point A and point B as a dusty circle that is seen from the inside of a car as it performs a donut maneuver, spinning in a never ending loop. Dizzy and directionless we try to find a steady course with advanced mapping technology. Several GPS devices with voice command simultaneously try to navigate becoming a chorus of possible routes, singing confusion and the pulling the traveller in many directions at once.