A Freeway's Concrete Certainty : Juan Delgado + Thomas McGovern

A Freeway’s Concrete Certainty

Statement

Freeways segregate our neighborhoods. Yet, there is more to the story of freeways than their socio-political impact. They are also aesthetic structures in the background of our lives. Our art puts them in the foreground, displaying how we are left negotiating the gaps between bumpers and the oddness of signage. Freeways post a set of propositions, testing certainty. They regulate us, encouraging our impulses as well. A freeway is close to us like the graffiti we ignore. Art is a re-awaking force when we translate a freeway into ink and paper and when we re-narrate a landscape that we occupy and carry in our heads like an alphabet. Our artwork is a narrative that hopefully leads to more storytelling. Freeways, superficial and profound, are more than their individual features, more than their comparison to other sites, and more than their differences. Freeways are more fragment-like and more about their intersections and sudden junctures and disruptions. They are intermediate places for negotiating among ourselves in discrete conditions. And too often, they are sites of dislocation and tragedy.