Leah
Gose

LEST WE TRAVEL TOO FAR

AS + LG Co Lab- Collaborative artwork by Ashlae Shepler & Leah Gose.

Our collaboration began as part of a self-designed, semester-long course in grad school. We were given the freedom to select partners, and ours was an automatic and lasting connection. During that semester, we not only discovered how well we work together, but also our infinite interests in a vast number of topics.

Early on, we knew we needed to address the issue that, more likely than not, we would live in separate states, have different jobs and home lives, and we designed project ideas around these concepts of continual moves and changes. At the core of our current work, specifically, we explore themes in individual psychology and ways that we can re-establish connections by visually documenting our shared experiences despite our separate physical locations. The camera, for us, is a tool to document our separate journeys and describe our sense of physical distance, isolation, and obsession with travel and exploration.

As long-distance collaborators, we record landscapes as we move through them, similar in approach to Jack Kerouac’s meandering On the Road and post-war idealism. We illustrate our travels using 4-lens lenticular film cameras, making images inspired by the aesthetic explorations of Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, and William Christenberry, photographers known for isolating scenery within the context.

With this approach, we build a library of photographs that we trade and re-construct into various photographic prints, videos, and installations. They act like anchors to our experience