Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: Drive By

Using a video camera to record from the window of a moving vehicle, the seventy-four video stills that comprise Drive By reflect the landscape of a developing suburban environment as commonly experienced by passerby – a peripheral view of a manufactured reality. The points at which rural, suburban and urban environments meet and intersect are in flux as are the cultural and aesthetic characteristics of this physical space. This piece is represented as a large, broken or unfinished grid designed to span across two adjoining walls. These choices were made in order to foreground notions of temporality, incompleteness, and sprawl.

Drive-By was originally influenced by the writings of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, particularly his book entitled The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space. The implementation of the railroad in the 19th-century radically transformed modes of travel, people’s perception of the landscape, introduced a collapse in time and space, and foreshadowed the beginnings of globalization. Contemporary suburban environments are architecturally designed as spaces one can only experience through the window of a moving vehicle. Physical connections to space are reduced only to points of departure and arrival, resulting in relative isolation and ambivalence towards the environment in which one exists.

Installation Images


Drive By (Installation View)
74 Video Stills Printed on Sintra and Mounted on Wood, 10" x 15" Each, 2005
Centre Des Artes Actuels Skol, Montreal, QC. Photo Credit: Guy L'heureux



Drive By (Installation View)
74 Video Stills Printed on Sintra and Mounted on Wood, 10" x 15" Each, 2005
Centre Des Artes Actuels Skol, Montreal, QC. Photo Credit: Guy L'heureux


Drive By (Installation View)
74 Video Stills Printed on Sintra and Mounted on Wood, 10" x 15" Each, 2005
Centre Des Artes Actuels Skol, Montreal, QC. Photo Credit: Guy L'heureux



Drive By (Installation View)
74 Video Stills Printed on Sintra and Mounted on Wood, 10" x 15" Each, 2005
Harnett Museum of Art, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA


Individual Images


Drive By (Detail)
74 Video Stills Printed on Sintra and Mounted on Wood, 10" x 15" Each, 2005



Drive By (Detail)
74 Video Stills Printed on Sintra and Mounted on Wood, 10" x 15" Each, 2005