Yonder_(within sight but not near)

Yonder_(within sight but not near) 2016/ The Yonder Series traces a poetic visual narrative along the Amtrak Crescent line from Penn Station in NYC to New Orleans in Louisiana. The thirty-hour train journey induces deep reverie. The sequence of twenty images in ‘Yonder’ is concerned with a state of mind. The very concept of ‘yonder’ as ‘something within sight but not near’ becomes a metaphor in this work for a destination that is unattainable. We see in the melancholy photographs a circular rather than a linear movement toward a purposeful destination. Ennui takes the place of action and resolution. It is a journey without end. We never reach yonder. It is not a story with a clear trajectory; these images are filmic and presented as a series of vignettes. Just as the speed of the train blurs and obscures our own memories of the past, we are in a state of transition from one place to the next. We retain only selective images, the ‘landmarks’ that are fixed in our consciousness. The view outside the cabin windows of the train acts in the same way; we are at once amid the urban decay, the romantic melancholia of the landscape blurred by sheets of rain and then taken indoors to dark hotel rooms, only to return to the platforms and the on the train once again. There is a brooding heavy atmosphere in the sequence of images, a suffocating lack of light and air as the world is passively observed from the window.