Road Cuts

Road Cuts

Road Cuts are a series of large-scale images that begun in early 2015 that continued for five years.  They are a response to the landscape of the Berkshires and Green Mountains from the perspective of McKay’s interest in examining the challenge of seeing and the layers of time.

Road cuts are rock faces exposed by the cutting of a road through a mountain or hill.  They are mundane, generally unseen, or not noticed, passed at high speed in a car.  They are a ubiquitous example of humanity’s violent, via dynamite, alteration of the landscape, to accommodate cars and trucks.  They expose the forceful vestiges of geological time from the perspective of the fleeting present.

The pictures are composed of five individual digital images, composed in the computer.  The separate frames are put together with the goal of creating a coherent composition, not an attempt to mimic reality.  This results in images that are formally quite similar: arcs of rock over a line of road.  When possible I emphasize the continuity of the form by disguising the seams between frames, especially in the sky and the road. This gives the viewer the feeling of a flow, which encourages the eye to scan back and forth, as it does in a speeding car.

The images are presented as archival pigment prints in a variety of sizes, but ideally large scale, up to 106 inches long.  Scale is integral to the work, as it is to the actual rock faces.  Counter-intuitively as the images are enlarged they open up rather than fall apart. They blossom as they grow, with a strange three-dimensional quality being revealed in the process.

This process mimics a personal struggle to see, in a fundamental way, worlds that are generally overlooked.  We see these things, if we notice them at all, only in passing.  The view is necessarily a scan, not a stare, like the frames of a film.  The process introduces both repetitions and voids, adding rhythm and complexity to an inherently static subject.  It also allows us to get closer while trying to examine carefully things that are normally difficult to see at all.

The issue of time: geological, historical, the now, the recent, the soon to come, is integral to the work. This is seen when it is viewed as a series.  The process involved revisiting the same two locations at different times of day, in different light, at different times of year, over five years.  In addition to underlining the theme of time, this captures a complexity of character, mood, emotion in the subject, which is both surprising and satisfying.

McKay’s response to the landscape focuses on the intangibles that surround it: light, air, gravity and especially time.  The road is both the time line and, in the extreme foreground, the horizon line, exposing a geology receding into the past and future. In essence he tries to find the invisible in the commonplace, the overlooked.  The objective is to create images with a transcendent sense of place: alienated from any particular time but immersed in its essence. this is the essiential purpose of art.