Underdonk

Underdonk Presents: Highway Blues

June 21-July 14, 2019
Opening Reception: Friday, June 21, 6-9 pm

Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles…

Bob Dylan, “Visions of Johanna”

There’s something about the summer that awakens the restless spirit in many; it marks a time of road trips, vacations, wilderness hikes & other forms of travel that disrupt, dislocate and otherwise confound the familiar and the mundane of our accustomed day- today lives.

What is it to wander, without specific aim or purpose, with improvisational, jazz-like, fluidness, like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, & their travels through the Americana of the late 1940’s, early 50’s, or William Butler Yeat’s Wandering Angus of the late 1890s, and his never-ending quest for the an unattainable love, Dylan’s Johanna. Perhaps, in the case of Angus and Dylan, this restless wandering is really a search for a romanticized ideal which is never fully arrived at. While Kerouac and Cassidy seemed to have found the God they were in search of, and Angus and Bob may remain eternally restless, each of their stories place abundant attention on the inextricable self, the entity we carry with us, wherever we may go.

In various ways, the twelve artists that comprise Highway Blues address themes of the traveler, & the landscape & characters that color their journey, whether it be along the highway, the swamp, the marsh, the forest, or the bog, however mythic or personal, romantic or existential, lonely or hopeful, poetic or concrete, general or specific. As a grouping of artworks, a picture emerges of the “road” as a state of mind, not only-but also-a literal, geographic location.

JJ Manford (6.15.19)