SIGHT LINES

In 2017, Katie Hargrave and I drove across the country together. We camped along the way, and on the road and in our tent, we often found ourselves in the shadows of RVs. During this trip we were struck by how the recreational vehicle makes nature accessible while also keeping it at a distance. Our campsite neighbors had all the comforts of home, in the middle of the desert, prairie, forest, on the beach, and in rainstorms. We began to question our own relationship to landscape – how were the tools that we were using (cameras, cars, hiking boots) mediating our experience as well? How are these instruments facilitating and manipulating our understanding of the natural world? Over the course of a year, we utilized different systems of mediation to capture  footage in state and national parks in Florida and California, the two most visited states in the country.

For an exhibition at the Wiregrass Museum of Art in the summer of 2019, we created a multi-media installation that included the images and video we took as well as diagrammatic illustrations explaining how to park an RV.

The installation also included photographs taken in state and national parks in California and Florida. On these trips, we converted vans and an old Airstream into cameras obscura. We blocked out all of the windows except for a small pinhole which served as a lens. The landscape outside the van or RV was projected upside down onto the interior of the vehicle through this lens.

The final component of the exhibition was a video installation. Found footage and video we shot in Florida RV parks was projected onto rearview mirrors that acted like screens. A coating on the mirror reflected the video onto shapes on the walls.