The Mythology of America
America is a land built on mythology. Cowboys, open roads, and frontier dreams of prosperity. But American mythology is an ouroboros, a serpent devouring its own tail. The same capitalism that breathes life into these myths also consumes them, warping them into something progressively shinier and emptier. With each passing generation, the myth drifts further from the reality, like a copy of a copy, losing definition and truth. What was once rough and real becomes polished and packaged, a story to be sold. The open road becomes a souvenir, the frontier a theme park, and the dream a marketing slogan. Route 66 is one of the most prominent of these American myths. The open road calling, the thrill of the journey, the car as king. These ideas are woven into the very fabric of American culture, and Route 66 is the myth-space where those ideas are nurtured and set loose unto the world.
In Europe and Asia, culture is shaped by time, a rich and deeply layered tapestry woven from centuries of history. But America's culture is shaped by space, a vast and violently unrelenting space. America's mythology is built not on ancient ruins or royal bloodlines, but on the open road, on the promise of motion, escape, and reinvention. Freedom, in the American imagination, is a highway stretching endlessly toward the horizon. Yet, like many myths, this one is built on contradictions and systematic exclusions. The open road that symbolizes boundless opportunity was never open to everyone. For the poor, for the marginalized, and for those intentionally and systemically excluded from the American dream, this freedom was always a conditional, perhaps even fantastical, notion. And yet, the myth endures.
The symbol of a murder weapon
The ruins of Route 66 tell a story not just of abandonment, but of execution. These crumbling homes and shuttered businesses weren’t simply left behind by accident; they were casualties of progress, victims of the same capitalist momentum that now dots the landscapes with shipping containers marked "Prime." The Eisenhower Interstate System wasn’t just an innovation; it was the death blow to Route 66, shattering the economies of small towns in the name of streamlining commerce and paving the way for the globalization-to-come. What remains are the remnants of a world that couldn’t survive, standing in the shadows of the very forces that killed it.
Corpus Delicti
The crime is long past, but the evidence remains. Shattered windows, collapsing roofs, and hollowed out buildings filled with used syringes, each bears witness to what once was. These ruins are the body of the crime, corpus delicti. Proof that the world that once thrived along Route 66 was not simply forgotten, but violently and systematically dismantled by intentional forces. Progress has no need for nostalgia; that's what souvenir shops are for.
The Only Truth
Everything along Route 66 fades. The buildings crumble, the neon signs flicker out, and the trinkets and mementos gather dust in forgotten, almost notional, roadside shops. The myth dissolves into something cheap, mass-produced, and marked "made in China," neatly repackaged for tourists chasing a past that never truly existed. But the landscape remains. It doesn’t need to be preserved in myth because it never disappeared. The vast deserts, the brooding mountains, the dramatic and endless skies. This is the only truth of Route 66, the one thing that endures long after the road and everything built upon it has decayed.
A Surviving WITNESS
The railroad predates Route 66, and yet, it still runs parallel to it, like an older sibling watching over the grave of a deceased brother or sister. While the road came and went, destroyed by economic progress and shifting economies, the trains still roll on, indifferently. In the ruins of Route 66, only the railroad remains, a reminder that commerce, not the human experience, is the only force that truly endures in this society.
An Artistic Interrogation: An Emergence of a New Humanity on Route 66
Route 66 exists in the collective imagination as a monument of mid-century modernist aesthetics, with its sleek neon, streamlined futurism, and the shiny veneer of American exceptionalism. But scattered along the ruins of this facade, a new visual language emerges, one that rejects the saccharine flavor of nostalgia and American exceptionalism and interrogates the myth of Route 66 itself.
This is an art of subversion that deconstructs the commodified iconography of American road trip culture and replaces it with something raw and deeply critical. It exists as site-specific and viewer participatory installations, assemblage sculpture, and unsanctioned interventions that reclaim space from the economic ruins and use the detritus of consumer culture as media.
Rather than reinforce the mid-century utopianism and American exceptionalism that once defined Route 66, this art tears away the veil and exposes the contradictions. It's an outright rejection of the myth in favor of a new narrative, one that acknowledges the displacement, erasure, and economic violence lurking beneath the shiny, mythical veneer. This work does not seek to memorialize Route 66, but to unravel it, interrogate it, and, ultimately, reclaim it as a space of authentic human expression, stealing the myth back from the clutches of late-stage capitalism and once again breathing life and humanity into the route, turning it back into a living, evolving human narrative.
Half-Baked Revitalization Efforts, Boring Museums, and Tacky Murals
The towns that remain along Route 66 exist in a strange state of limbo, caught between nostalgia and neglect, between half-baked and half-hearted attempts at revitalization and the slow march of an inevitable decay. These are places where the past is repackaged in vulgar, cartoonish murals and boring museums, where the myth of Route 66 is force-fed to tourists in a desperate bid for relevance and commerce. But beneath all the kitsch and the cracked paint, there is something raw: The violent ugliness and quiet banality of life in these increasingly forgotten spaces. My photographs do not romanticize these places. They strip away the fantasy and confront what remains.
And Yet, Despite All This, The Open Road Still Beckons
Despite all these shattered dreams and all this economic violence, despite the emptiness of these myths, there remains something infinitely alluring about Route 66 and the idea of the open road. It calls out to us, promising freedom and opportunity. We know, deep down, that it's illusory, but the myth is too strong and too deeply embedded in our psyches to resist.
