Road Kill

The American institution of the Road Trip has served as muse for artists for as long as this country has had a destiny to manifest. From wagon trains to Jack Kerouac, Mike Watt to Cormac McCarthy, the splendid vista of the open road unspooling its many miles has given voice to something primal and mythological in the American psyche. Greg Stimac explores the song of the road in the eponymously titled show of photography and video, Greg Stimac, at White Flag Projects (4568 Manchester Avenue; 314-531-3442 or www.white-flag-projects.org). Here we see the mighty buffalo, whose seasonal migrations laid the foundations of the road reduced to a black matte cutout propped up in various empty swathes of prairie, and piss bottles sprouting up like 21st-century wildflowers by generic roadsides as the world stretches to a blur in the background. The great road novel, fruit of a wild trip, is rendered as a physical documentary in the form of a Plexiglas screen dotted with the exploded bodies of unknowable insects obliterated as a matter of course on a 75-mile-per-hour drive from here to there. This is the road trip seen not as a romantic cleansing ritual, but as a race against death that leaves excrement and carnage as its mile markers. Greg Stimac opens with a free public reception from 7 to 10 p.m. Saturday, April 24, and the work remains on display through Saturday, May 22. White Flag Projects is open on Wednesday and Saturday.
Wednesdays, Saturdays. Starts: April 24. Continues through May 22, 2010