The Truth is I Miss You Monday, September 06 - SEATTLE TACOMA WA(SEA) to CHICAGO-MIDWAY(MDW): The inspiration for this work began with a single plane flight. The flight was characterized by mixed emotions: leaving old friends and a landscape I felt a deep connection to left a void inside me. Yet that void was quickly filled with thoughts of the family I was returning to. This journey from the West to Midwest became emblematic of a subtle priority shift that I have experienced recently. The landscape of the West has always called to me like nowhere else. Yet as the years pass, more and more of my family has migrated in the other direction. Stuck in the middle (both literally and figuratively), I am torn between the West, where I find the land to which my heart belongs, and the East, where I find the people to whom my heart belongs. As I get older, the call to move eastward has slowly but surely overtaken the call to move westward. Contemporary culture seems to be characterized by disconnects: political disconnect, socio-economic disconnect, cultural disconnect. We walk on to an airplane and several hours later step off into another place with little sense of the distance we have traversed. The media polarizes and fragments us into neatly defined binaries: Democrat/Republican, rich/poor, pro-life/pro-choice, East/West. As I stared out the window on my flight from Seattle to Chicago I watched the space slowly pass that connects these two places and was reminded that these binaries are ultimately constructions. If we step back we see instead that all things are connected as distinct points along a continuum. This work is about that connection. This work is about the journey.
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