Erin Ashenhurst |Interdisciplinary Artist and Writer<\/p>\n

DIS\/<\/em>APPEAREANCES ON A HIGHWAY:
\nA Model Drive<\/h4>\n

Dis\/Appearances on a Highway <\/em>constructs elements of a road trip from Vancouver to Stewart, BC. Juxtaposing fragments of text describing a personal narrative with photographs of the landscape that appear to be taken from the secure distance of a car, the work explores a terrain experienced as an otherness. The highway does not offer its user an idealized countryside or untouched wilderness, but is instead an artery threading through the province where small towns host tired motels, churches, and abandoned mines. For this driver, the mountains grow into a foreboding presence.<\/p>\n

At first glance, the photography in Dis\/<\/em>Appearances<\/em> could be read as unassuming snapshots, but there is fraudulence and playfulness in their assembly. While photographs taken on location gesture to cinematic staging, the framing of the car interior is done using a Playmobil<\/em> toy from a kit appropriately titled \u201cCity Life.\u201d By disrupting the traditional road-trip snapshot with the illusory layer of the model windshield, the images create a fictional subjectivity from what might otherwise be seen as documentation. While pages of prose juxtaposed with imagery are conventionally used to signal the development of a linear storyline, here the fragmentation of text and the falsity of image test a viewer\u2019s desire to form a cohesive narrative. Indeed, in one image, the glimpse of a plastic deer threatens to push things towards the absurd.<\/p>\n

Though the trip described traverses less than two-thirds of the province, it is a distance of almost 1,500 kilometers\u2014the same distance of a drive from Rome to Paris, or less than Madrid to Marrakesh. In Dis\/Appearances,<\/em> the vastness of Western Canada does not signify the journey of an adventurer, but rather an unstable relationship negotiated through the window of an ever-transient vehicle.<\/p>\n

---

\n

It was August and it seemed as if we had spent the
\nsummer driving and watching things die. They died all
\nday in sudden, lonely blasts of yellow cream, and red
\njam, and clear jelly. We would comment on how big or
\nbloody, and then I would yank forward the lever for the
\nwindshield fluid and the wipers would spread their exotic
\ncarcasses in half-moons across the glass.<\/p>\n

By the time we made it to the town of Clinton,
\nBritish Columbia, we were desperate to escape the
\nshape of the car. Hours on the road and the catch
\nof our knees like a reluctant folding chair, wood
\nbloated in the heat.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

On the highway, human density was exchanged for
\ninsects, bunions of brown grass, and trees with crooked
\nwhite arms. Gravel shoulders hissed under tread and
\nthe wide sky turned robin\u2019s egg blue to seething sepia.
\nThere were stars.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As the sky grew dim, the insects thickened the air with
\nthe vehemence of a death drum. In a pink sunset towards
\nWilliams Lake, we mistook the rapid explosions of their
\nbodies for rain. Then, in the dark, oncoming headlights turned
\ntheir ruins opaque and I had to squint through the smears
\nto keep on the road. We turned the music up and the twists
\nof the canyon were abstracted in orange reflectors and the
\nfloating taillights of monstrous big rigs.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One night, after the evening had throbbed with lightning before the
\nquiet, deep black, the hazard lights of a hatchback ahead flashed the body
\nof a deer. The car was pulled off the road and the deer lay behind on its
\nside, head pointed towards the near edge of the highway. We slowed to
\nsee the haunches, hooves perfectly aligned and motionless. A pickup
\ntruck had pulled in front of the car and a large man walked between the
\nvehicles, cigarette smoke snaking around his face.<\/p>\n

I turned the high beams on through the mask of insect sludge as we
\nlunged into the valley.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At the mouth of Vanderhoof, we saw a billboard for a missing
\nwoman. Her face was three meters tall, blonde, beaming.
\nA number with a long string of zeros measured the value of her
\nreturn. She had been at a lake party two years ago when, just
\nbefore dawn, she slipped into the unknown. I saw a poster for
\nher in a coffee shop and one taped to the back window of a grimy
\ngray van. The message was clear: careful, this highway
\ncould consume you.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I could feel he had changed once we passed the city
\nlimits. Become calm and loose. He had done this drive
\nfor years\u2014a feverish marathon in a battered Ford Tempo
\nhot with summer, or a cramped doze in the back of a
\nGreyhound bus on Christmas Eve. I had only flown to his
\nhometown before, where the sudden dwarfing proximity
\nof the mountains made me nervous.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In these towns, video stores thrived and phone reception
\nwavered. Buildings were brick and wood, stucco, and
\naluminum siding. It felt as if the rules were different,
\nbut then I thought of my husband\u2019s disapproving look when
\nI explained why I had decided to leave the pleasant malaise
\nof my towel to wade in the lake. \u201cI had to pee,\u201d I said.
\nIt had seemed natural, clearly the best place.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The couple had an RV and two Siberian Huskies
\nnamed Smokey and Bandit. They said a party of three
\nhad made it through the tunnels last spring. It had
\ntaken most of a day with their headlamps illuminating
\nthe rusted debris abandoned in the dark.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou shouldn\u2019t try in those flip-flops,\u201d they agreed.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We drove for days and I wondered if,
\nat the end of this highway, the mountains
\nwould swell and swallow me up.<\/p>\n

Perhaps, I thought, I could just wait in the car.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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