I'm very interested in the formal, abstract qualities of freeways, highways, and interchanges but I also see them as nostalgic structures from the golden age of carbon-based fuels that can evoke bittersweet feelings of loss and regret. For me, they hearken back to a time, especially in California, when we drove from place to place without a thought in our collective head as to how we were affecting the environment and our natural inheritance. I see these structures now as illusory "free" ways where we paint our dreams with enormous concrete brush strokes all the while clogging our airways with greenhouse gasses. These Interchanges that were once celebrated as facilitators of commerce, communication, and even love are now often seen as chaotic tangles of knots we must find our way out of.

For me, they still retain a dark, conflicted beauty. They are reminders that although we humans have used technology and engineering to solve our problems in the past, I can’t help but wonder if that strategy will work for us again this time around. With this series of paintings I’ve been trying to illuminate some of these questions and contradictions.

The imagery in these paintings and drawings explores the idea of home as an ephemeral construct in constant flux. Always being reconfigured into new relationships with our selves, our work, our families, and—perhaps now more than ever—the environment that sustains us, the idea of home has recently become even more fluid, and in some ways more insecure than ever before.

Unreal Estate concerns the growing improbability of the American Dream and asks if we might somehow re-imagine it. Is there a way we can invent a new kind of home for ourselves that breaks all the rules and still makes us happy?

These portraits of friends, family, and imaginary people are selected from a body of work done in the 1980s in San Francisco and New York City.

© 2011 stuart cameron vance