For nine months beginning in August 2008 and through May 2009 I was employed and lived in Huntington, West Virginia. During this time I was separated from my family who had stayed behind in Buffalo, New York. Each week, on Thursday and Sunday, I would commute between the two cities. What emerged was a ritual of travel concentrated at trying to retain a physical presence and emotional connection to each place in my absence.

This series of photographs makes use of a vernacular hand gesture, common in West Virginia, which serves as an impromptu map of the state. An actual road map was projected over my own hand while I illustrated the local gesture. The drawn line that becomes visible in the final two images in the sequence corresponds to the route that was driven between Huntington and Buffalo during the nine month period. With this piece of personal geography mapped on my hand, I visited a palm reader (who was located along the route) to have the line interpreted, as it existed within the arrangement of my natural palm print.

My time in West Virginia was marked by a perpetual transience. The constant movement between places left little possibility for a slower and more deliberate interaction. With the car as a constant mediator, the incoherent simultaneity of isolation, attachment, dislocation, anxiety, fluidity, and freedom that stems from being located in-between became commonplace. As a way of life, it is a relatively modern development fostered by the American emphasis on individualized mobility and increasingly made necessary by the demands of a recessionary economy, wherein people find themselves on the road, moving towards wherever the next available job may be.

Towards the end of my time in West Virginia, the absurdity of existing within a place, but only knowing it essentially through the homogeneity of the interstate system, motivated a desire for a better understanding of my existence within it. The palm reading, created in the final weeks before leaving Huntington, became a device to potentially make manifest an underlying importance or meaning to what was otherwise a sustained, yet ultimately superficial, interaction. Also problematic was a personal need to justify the time and energy in the movement between these two cities that was lost at the expense of my own family.

In a globalized world, this experience was a microcosm of shifting cultural and social paradigms wherein we find ourselves negotiating the psychological residue of our considerable physical migrations. This project, irresolute in its methodology, is an illustration of one such reconciliation of this increasingly shared experience. - Buffalo, NY 5/18/09

© 2009