JENNY PAPALEXANDRIS

Yonder (within sight but not near) 

The Yonder Series traces a poetic visual narrative along the Amtrak Crescent Line from Penn Station in NYC to New Orleans in Louisiana. The thirty-hour train journey induces deep reverie. The sequence of twenty-five images in ‘Yonder’ is concerned with a state of mind. Memory does not follow a straight path, and similarly this story cannot be told in a linear structure (sequential) but rather the form is circular (recurrent) to evoke the dream sequence presented. 

The images are filmic and presented as a series of vignettes with the use of jump cuts, flashbacks, and deliberate repetition to mimic the way memories are recalled. Just as the speed of the train blurs and obscures our vision, our memories of the past are in a state of transition from one place to the next. We retain only selective images, the ‘landmarks’ that are fixed in our consciousness.

The view outside the cabin window of the train acts in the same way; we watch as urban decay, fleeting faces, the melancholia of the landscape blurred by sheets of rain relentlessly passes us by as if caught in a film noir dream. We are then transported indoors to dark hotel rooms, only to return to the platform and the on the train once again. There is a brooding heavy atmosphere to the sequence of images, a suffocating lack of light and air as the world is passively observed from the window.

The very concept of ‘yonder’ becomes a metaphor in this work for a destination that is unattainable, a journey without end. Ennui takes the place of action and resolution. We are made of longing caught in a loop of time.