Evan Lindquist, Gallery of Scenic Routes

I work with themes that interest me personally. I don't create work that is intended merely to satisfy other people. Many of my prints, such as the Scenic Routes series, are satires on the values we hold as a culture.

People in our culture place major value on giant super highway structures. We consider them to be major pillars of our culture -- "infrastructure". They enable us to acquire all the ridiculous things we own. If people were forced to give up one thing or one idea in our culture each day, highways would be one of the last that we would offer up in sacrifice. At that point, our culture as we know it would become fragmented and disappear.

I use the exaggerated highway overpasses as metaphors for problems within our culture.

Giant structures depicted in my prints are necessary for moving our people and for transporting cheap consumer goods that we purchase from Chinese and Indian factories. The gigantic pillars are "roots" for big-box stores that sprout like weeds everywhere. In my prints, overpasses are covering up everything in the landscape, growing the same way the Kudzu weed entangles and gradually covers parts of the American South -- out of control.

While doing these prints, the words of a poem played often in my head. I learned it in grade school. It's a gentle poem about a peaceful view of harmonious life.

"I would not sit in the scorner's seat,
Or hurl the cynic's ban;
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man." (Sam Foss)

In my prints there is no house by the side of the road -- its place has been covered over by pavement. I try to be "a friend to man" by raising questions in the minds of thoughtful people. I try to "hurl the cynic's ban" when it's needed.

My "Scenic Routes" have "Cynic Roots".

These prints ask metaphorically: Is that where our culture is taking us? What is our heritage and what are we exchanging it for?