An Interstate Runs Through It woodcut 2003 21″ x 9 1/2″

The Random Print of the Week, a woodcut by Anthony Lazorko, captures the highway and a fleeting travel narrative of an automotive-centric American landscape. In this work a New Mexican mountain range, probably the Organ Mountains, has been carefully rendered with cutting tools and printed in three colors. Against this background an interstate highway literally “runs through it”, runs through and over the landscape. A pack of white, anonymous semi-trucks instinctively hauls goods from here to there. Somewhat nostalgic, the image reminds me of the early days of American highway culture but the print also acts as an anti-landscape in which the mountains are a backdrop for American commerce.  In this landscape isolation and anonymity ensue as vehicles join the streaming herd of steel and cargo. To those familiar with this stretch of highway the location is specific. It’s that stretch of New Mexico outside Las Cruces where the mountains open up and you drop down into desert, where the late afternoon sun has finally gone behind some clouds, and where I am alone, confronting what I find there.

BMG