Chapter #1
Onward and Upward: Manifest Destiny

Interstate 10 from Jacksonville, FL to Lake City, FL

October 14 - November 13, 2013

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Shana Lutker (b. 1978, Northport, NY) is a Los Angeles-based artist that investigates various ideas and interpretations of history (and its physiological influence) through drawings, sculptural installations, performances, and photographs. Shana Lutker's billboard series Onward and Upward represents the excitement of exploration and expansion in concert with a sense of disappointment associated with the realization that this new world does not always live up to the idealized fantasy. For Lutker's series of billboards, she looked to the sky: depictions of skies over Jacksonville and the New World that combine reality and fantasy. Using source material such as a painting of pre-Spanish Florida, a photo of Jacksonville in 1909, and a 17th century etching of explorers' ships approaching, each image of fantastical sky is set within the Jacksonville sky, or vice versa. The billboard - typically a site for advertising dreams - is pictured on itself, as a house of mirrors of both fantasy and reality, written in the clouds.