12 Hour Road Trip — An Art Collaboration

The concept of a 12-hour road trip as a source for developing an art collaboration began with photographer William Isom’s long-term project to document Tennessee’s rapidly disappearing tobacco-drying barns. Partnering with painter Katie Walberg and media/film artist Amira Inas, the trio set out on a rainy February morning at 5 a.m. with cameras and an eclectic soundtrack of everything from bluegrass to hip hop. They traveled highways and back roads south toward Chattanooga, along the Alabama border, then north through Nashville to Clarksville and back to Knoxville. Their finished project will be on exhibit at The Birdhouse this October with an opening reception Friday, Oct. 3, from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.

The exhibit will recreate the artist’s experience with works and correspondence created during the trip along with music reflective of their journey. Isom will show six photographs from his tobacco warehouse series in addition to other photographs from the trip that he has turned into postcards. Postcards aren’t a new idea for Isom. He previously transformed photographs he took while visiting Cuba in 2000 into pastel, vintage-style postcards that look as though they could have been purchased in the pre-Castro era. Walberg will show illustrations from a graphic novel documenting the adventures of “Trash Ball.” Walberg has long been interested in human detritus, producing a long series of paintings that portray dumps and the large machinery used to bury what we discard. Inas, a partner in local artist group Sweet Southern Pixels, will have on hand several short videos from the barn-documenting trip and a display of Polaroid photos, envelopes and notes mailed back to Knoxville during the journey, including hourly journal entries documenting the collaboration.

Also on hand for the opening will be three performing artists — The Bearded, Black Atticus and Tricia Gene Brady — that will play the genres of music that reflect the culture of the land the artists traveled and echo the type of music the three artists were listening to as they drove along their route.

KV: Describe your personal missions on this trip.

Isom: I originally went to document what tobacco warehouses I could find. They are no longer used because of changes in state and federal tobacco regulations. They are starting to tear them down all over the Southeast. I had actually found this old list of tobacco warehouses in Middle Tennessee online, and so I kind of drew out a map and that became the route for our trip. We stopped in Dechard, Fayetteville, Winchester, Clarksville, Springfield and Adams.
Inas: My part of the project was the whole idea that we were going on a road trip. They aren’t happening that much anymore, especially because of [the price of] gas going up. Since William was going to be using silver gelatin film, I was thinking about something else that was going out. I decided to bring a Polaroid camera with me along with my digital camera. I do a lot of portraits and self-portraits, so I wanted to do that in various locations we went to. I wanted to incorporate Polaroid because I wanted to speak to this other thing, in that we aren’t going to have any more instant photos in this manner, [since Polaroid instant film will no longer be produced in 2009]. One of the things I did was on each of our main stops I would take a photograph and send it back from the closest mailbox we could find with notes about the location. I wanted to speak about some old-school things like mailing a letter or card; they also aren’t done as much anymore because of e-mail.
Walberg: I’m working on a graphic novel that will be featuring Trash Ball as a lovable but disgusting character  — he is sort of my alter-ego in a way — this disgusting ball of garbage born from our own environment of refuse and waste. The reason I was so excited about the trip was that it was the perfect opportunity to get a lot of photographs of different towns and rural areas to use for the illustrations that I’m going to be putting into this graphic novel. It is going to be about Trash Ball’s realization of its own existence as it interacts with the environment and the human population within it.

KV: Were there any places you stopped that weren’t on your original route?

Walberg: Well, I know one place we stopped right before we got to Winchester that had this huge scrap metal field in the middle of nowhere. Amira and I climbed the fence and were just running around in there like kids in a candy store and taking photos of stuff rusting, and all of a sudden this person pulls up in a white pick-up and says, “This is my property. What are you guys doing?” and William says that we are just working on an art project.  He (this person) says, “I’ve seen a lot of things in my life, but I’ve never seen people taking pictures of scrap metal!”

KV: Did William’s CD playlist affect what you were doing in any way?

Walberg: There was some ridiculous singing, especially toward the end, when we were pretty delirious.
Isom: The music set the mood.
Inas: Outside of making it a great journey, it influenced the video footage I was getting. In certain moments in the video, the music is in the background behind the noises we were making. It definitely affected the emotion of the video.

KV: So, did you finish the trip in the planned 12 hours?

Walberg: Yes — and we even documented it on video!