U-haul Psalm
how far the van
There’s nothing more prosaic than a U-Haul van (except maybe a Campbell’s soup can). But after more than a year of lockdown, isolation and economic stoppage during the pandemic, the franchised moving trucks could once again be spotted on the street below — and each one felt like another word in a nascent psalm. The world was opening up once more.
Spotting different vans over the lessening lock-down days was like a real-world version of those criss-crossing airplane maps you see in international espionage movies. All those places to escape to...
Each van had a different location text and associated graphic in vinyl on the side. The Yukon truck’s image was a camel. Idaho’s included a zebra. Alberta had an aircraft carrier. The Minnesota one showed a Viking ship. When travel between countries, across states, and passage within cities, parks, and even stores (with their taped and arrowed lanes) was so heavily restricted, any thought of going elsewhere, by any means, was a relief. Aircraft carrier sailing the prairies, okay! Minnesota was exotic - and its associated graphic inspired wilder thoughts of overseas journeys: Norway! And Idaho meant Africa. The New Mexico van was the best though — it showed aliens, and that meant billions of miles of travel!
So after a grand pause — downtown so silent for a while you could hear a bird chirp — the song of life started again (and on the chorus!). In the decades to come it’ll be very hard to convey how profound it was — after so many months of school closures, empty offices and unrush hours — to look down and spot an ordinary moving van on the street below. And how great it was to look up, and once again see planes, pointed to far places, in the sky above. Some possibly even heading to Norway.
NOTES:
- Below is another work that looks at migration, transience, and uncertainty, and which also uses discrete elements to create a much larger piece. (This modular approach enables a lot of my artworks to be infinitely recombinant and intercombinant in form, and fluid in content over time): IOTA is a ‘decentralized’ painting in 30 seprate 24x18” parts. Each individual part is to be distributed (owned) globally as a unique node of the overall 108x120” work, with the agreement to allow it to be shown every 20 years into the future collectively with all the other pieces/pantings. Over the decades the individual pieces will accrete narratives as they travel, are sold, inherited, get damaged, go missing. Those growing stories will all be told alongside each 2nd decade’s exhibited iteration of the work, with any missing spaces adding to the history by their absence. Long-view art.
More about IOTA HERE, but check the images & mockup below:
- The subtitle of this post refers to the post “How Far the Man” cuz it too uses multiple shots from different angles/times to cover a single subject over a year+
- this post’s equation: peripatetic + prosaic x pandemic = poetic
- “Psalms of lament express the author’s crying out to God in difficult circumstances” -wiki
- We rented many U-Hauls over the weeks it took to leave The Window building. We were moving to a location still within our own city, but because it wasn’t by choice (building expropriation) it still felt thousands of miles away. It might as well have been to one of those alien places on the side of the New Mexico truck. Never once, not a single time, did I photograph any U-Haul we ourselves used.