Piece: “Tracking Flight Paths”
Venue: The Jerome Liebling Center, Amherst, MA
As a child, I used to spend hours on the roof of my porch, logging the flight paths of airplanes as they flew overhead. At the time, I was heading into adolescence and eager to head out and explore the world. Each time I logged the direction and time of a flight, it was like brushing up against an adventure, bringing me closer to some distant destination. The steady stream of airplanes made the exploration of the world seem continuous and inevitable.
As I have grown older and the world has continued to globalize, my romantic vision of airplanes has become tinged with apprehension. It is with this uneasiness that I have resumed my activity of plane-gazing, this time adding a photographic record to the logged information. The images were framed in thrift and dollar store frames ranging from 5"x7" to 9"x12" and displayed like a restaranteur's proudly sported collection of celebrity headshots. Similar to those collected photos, these airplanes are each a product of a brief association with a larger unknown.