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.
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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.
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KATIE HARGRAVE’s interested in the production of American identity through politics, history, mythology, and narrative. Her work elevates stories from popular culture, those hidden in the archives, and the everyday conversations from passerby’s and participants. Her work has been shown at Proof Gallery in Boston; Gallerie Analix in Geneva, Switzerland; the Manifesta Biennial in Murcia, Spain; The Philadelphia Art Alliance, and the Athens Institute of Contemporary Art, to name a few.
More information about Katie Hargrave can be found at katiehargrave.us/
NICK LALLY is an artist, computer programmer, and geographer in training interested in digital media, collaboration, radical politics, mathematics, education, space, and bicycles. He spends his time between Oakland, CA and Madison, WI.
More information about Nick Lally can be found at nicklally.com
DANIEL LUEDTKE lives, labors and loves in Chicago and makes art between several mediums such as drawing, sculpture, video and music. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2013 and has exhibited work nationally and internationally in spaces such the Walker Art Center – Minneapolis, Devening Projects – Chicago, the Tom of Finland Foundation – Los Angeles, Sue Scott Gallery – New York and NP3 Gallery – Netherlands.
More information about Daniel Luedtke can be found at dnml.org
KATE BOWEN is an artist, educator and curator living in Chicago. She is a teaching artist with the high school outreach program Picture Me and an adjunct faculty member at the Illinois Institute of Art. She is the Video Programming Coordinator at the Museum of Contemporary Photography.
More information about Kate Bowen can be found at katembowen.com
