In "Paths to Land" by Carla Andrade (previously featured here), the artist captures images of pervasive asphalt and winding roads in a variety of rural settings. Though the photographs presented are elusive--as the destination is never clear--Andrade's work alludes to the path of life and humanity's own uncertainty of the future. On her website, Andrade explains her work in her artist statement:
About roads and landscapes. Cosmology of recognizable and new elements. Roads are shown as new metaphors, as new grounds to conquer. In this ontological research of "way", I’m interested in the idea of way as "origin". An element that guides and avoid to go adrift, but we can only control one part of it, its end is always unpredictable. The road shows what is going to be, or what hasn’t still become. It’s a mystery in itself. Like this, path as humans fundamental "ignorance" has a deep symbolic meaning, we all seek to know and also to dream about what isn’t known. Another key idea is the road as a "means" for men to go through the nature. Way of domination of landscape, piercing and cutting it. Men, as a microcosm, need to create artificial pathways to allow them to move through the natural world. Faced with a powerful nature, the human being needs a shelter; they need the artificial to catch the natural.
Whenever my parents and I would drive on stretches of road like this, I always felt like an observer, it was intimate. To view the quiet profoundness of whatever world lie beyond it. I've always wondered if I stepped beyond, just for a little while so that I'd come back to the road to sit on its edge and watch the world I, for a brief time, was intruding on. Like throwing a pebble in a pond and watching to it's nondescript reaction.
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