Lines: Portland
Iris prints based on road repair lines made by the Public Services crew and exhibited at the City Council Chambers Gallery in City Hall, Portland, ME, 2011
“Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities…” — Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Walking engages every form of seeing — direct vision, peripheral noticing, attentiveness, and inattention. The pace of walking shapes the pace of perception. Portland is a city built for walkers, and the images in this exhibition grew out of my meanderings through the Munjoy Hill neighborhood with my dog Mayson.
For several years, I photographed the repair lines made on the streets of Portland. In the summer, while preparing for a print project during an Artist Residency at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I began looking at these photographs in a new way. A series of photo etchings quickly failed, but the project shifted when I isolated the gestural marks from their asphalt ground. Freed from context, the questions multiplied: Who made these marks? By what means? And why did they hold such visual force?
When seen simply as lines, the marks made by the Portland Road crew resonate with East Asian brush painting, Abstract Expressionism, and even early cave painting. They drip, pool, and require skill to control — a single motion carrying intention, speed, and necessity.
My work enters into dialogue with these functional gestures. It calls attention to the ordinary and to how the overlooked can radically shift perception when seen in a different light. The smallest gesture can reveal a larger world of possibility.
I wish to thank Allen West, David Wolf, Joan Livingstone, Pedre Knoth, Art House, Marty Pottenger, and the team at Art At Work, and—last but never least—Local 481 and the crew.
