The Trips series is a distillation of one road trip to Bralorne, BC. The series is an attempt to reduce huge human concepts to tiny fragments, the bare ephemeral wisps of tracery that we leave behind us in our travels from the beginning to the end of our lives.

For all the impact we arrogantly believe we have on the world, the damage and degradation we create, we’re a tiny blip, a smear, an insignificant event in the universe. In our absence, our supposed impact is reduced to a blur of pretty colour, a swatch of black upon the asphalt, an insignificant fraction of reality.

The series' photos are abstracted, sometimes because of the blur of fast motion, other times because a close section of asphalt, taken out of the larger context of "road", becomes less road-like and more a study of texture and tonality.

The road's dividing lines are paint slashes bisecting a canvas, the divots and gouges are scars.

Intimate knowledge of parts of things allows us a more intimate knowledge of the whole. How we choose to look, and what we choose to see, provides us with context. We may miss beauty if we are stuck with old notions of roadness, old notions of scenery and scenic.

Is a road just a road, or is there profound beauty in seemingly mundane human or natural creation? Are wispy highway-side stands of sunburned grass nothing more than visual noise distracting us from the vistas beyond? Or, are there oases on the highway shoulders?

Speeding down a stretch of highway, we miss much of the scenery that whips past our windows. Unless a view is majestic—mountain, lush valley, violent, turbulent river—it is given little regard. If we choose to look, we may find that we are missing micro-vistas that road travel, and life travel, offer us.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Persig, the main character speaks of our disconnectedness from nature from within our cars' compartments. He is speaking of more than highway travel:

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

Persig's main character realizes that on a motorcycle, he is simultaneously the viewer of scenery, and part of the scenery, experiencing his surroundings in a way that car passengers cannot.

Motorcycle travel is one means of breaching the barrier that separates us from our environment, allowing yourself to look, to see, is another.