RIMA CANAAN LEE
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America: Under Construction -
America: Under Construction


For two years, between 2012 and 2014, I photographed the booming highway construction around Fort Worth. I already knew that North Texas was one of the fastest growing regions in America, but had not considered how that growth requires vast new highways that connect more directly communities and places. The population growth necessitates a new network of communication that alters our lives by changing our relationship to time, to one another, and to the places that we traverse, visit, or inhabit.

What struck me early in 2012 was how the construction sites were at once monumental yet ephemeral. I often felt the structures reminded me of a monumental structure from Antiquity, yet I would return the following week only to find that, as construction had progressed, the structure had disappeared. Always I found in the sites abstractions, so that the project became a search for abstraction in the concrete. Although aware that the construction was to create new pathways for human transportation, to connect hitherto unconnected places, I often felt I was photographing something intangible, perhaps synapses in the brain. The roads became neurons, an external representation of a neural highway that permits and facilitates new pathways, new links.

 

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