Throughout America, there are long, winding highways that go on for miles, stone-cold, desolate and uninhabited. Drivers undergo hours of endless driving without seeing another face, another car, anything.
The tediousness and monotony of the highway is what photojournalist Jessica Kourkounis attempts to illustrate in her current show "Road Show (TX)" at the CEPA Art Gallery.
"'The Road Show' is a body of photography and video-based work," stated Kourkounis in a press release, "that offers a view of the random and seemingly spontaneous emergence of superhighways while examining areas where the hard elements of freeway culture encroach upon and co-exist with the fragility of human beings."
If "boring" is what Kourkounis tries to exemplify in her artwork, she certainly succeeds.
There are three walls with enlarged scenes of total isolation. One wall of six pieces simply titled "The Waiting" quickly reminds any driver who has ever had to travel through endless roads of nothingness, urging for something of interest to arise. Huge rock structures taken at just the right angle portray loneliness perfectly.
The opposite wall is full of pieces of city streets. Blurred visions of street signs and nightlife give the impression of an empty, broken-down old town.
Betsy Higgins, one of the show's attendants, enjoyed the enlarged photos the most.
"The big pictures are completely spectacular," said Higgins.
Jim Tomkins, a building contractor from Grand Island, pointed out that the angles were his favorite characteristic of the artwork.
"There is nice usage of linear perspective in a few works," Tomkins said as he pointed to a piece from "The Waiting."
The photographs were shot from a moving vehicle. The night shots were taken with 35mm film, and the day shots were captured with a digital camera.
Kourkounis also ventures into the video medium occasionally. "Road Show (TX)" includes three videos, two in black-and-white and one in color.
"The videos further explain how tedious highways are," Kourkounis said. "The videos are more fun. They give the feeling of making you sick, like car sick."
Some video viewers had to leave the room where the videos were playing.
"The video definitely succeeded in making the viewers car sick," said Jay Monti, the owner of a gallery in Ellicottville.
One of the videos consists of repetitive footage of toy cars crashing, driving around, almost hitting people, with loud upbeat 80's techno music. The video then takes a turn into a portrayal of hard work and the true tediousness of superhighways.
Another video shows the ongoing process of construction and the effort that goes into maintaining the highways, featuring hard-working Americans surrounded by slow-moving traffic.
Like many of the photographs, several videos were shot from a moving vehicle. Kourkounis used a Canon x1-1 and a Canon Elph, and the black-and-white videos were shot on film.
To add to the repetitive monotony of the videos and the desolate loneliness of the photos, the show was set in the basement of the CEPA Art Gallery. The initial dungeon effect as the viewer walks downstairs adds to an overall impression similar to that of a deserted highway.
The opening reception for Jessica Kourkounis' "Road Show (TX)" was Friday. The show continues in CEPA's Underground Gallery through Oct. 29.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
