Passing Through

On the highway path past Pontiac’s city center sits a useless fence protecting empty land from what would otherwise be a more or less open disdain. Perhaps to quiet some of that unease, local political activist, artist, historian, and sitting council President, Michael McGuinness, lined the links with brightly colored caps cast off from passing hubs, formerly littering sidewalks, alleyways, and gutters, now constituents of a psychedelic farewell for concrete gambollers. Beyond the exuberance produced by the sudden eruption of that steel mural on any passing motor, I’m not sure what Brother Mike meant. For myself, I take the wheel-within-the-wheel in the Biblical sense, as a passing through, toward beyond. And the lost caps remind me of the abandoned shoes left in piles around the Packard plant in the early 2000s, themselves both signs of Detroit’s mourning, and evocation of the still larger losses indexically memorialized by shoe shrines in Polish camps. Like these other gestures toward passing, Mike McGuinness’s bright washed hubs bleach memory in their glare, becoming Polaroid distractions from the scent of mildew and decay that ribbons the region. While such repressions never fully succeed, they need not fail. Reality returns. But now partially obscured, and permanently beyond reach. Maybe that's the gift we give each other when we lie. We collude by concealing the reality of our nightmares, and, in doing so, pledge our love. 

July 2025

Instax Square instant prints mounted over cyanotype large format contact print. 

11"x14" in frame.