Meat Market Gallery is pleased to present Under the Western Freeway, a selection of photographs by Dustin Aksland and Suspended Series, featuring four video works by media artist Amy Hicks.

As a teenager, photographer Dustin Aksland spent summers driving through California's Central Valley for his father's delivery business. Gazing at the region's social landscape through box-van windows sparked a fascination with the hypocrisies of American life that form the basis of his current practice. Today, these thoughts take form in the images selected for Under the Western Freeway, a collection of photographs taken alone during road trips through the West. For this series, the artist, armed with a camera and an eye for the the sublime beauty found in the incongruities of American society, captures images that seem to suggest narratives of a somewhat Steinbeckian nature: a hauntingly beautiful California landscape riddled with loneliness and plagued by class struggle.

Like Aksland, San Francisco based Amy Hicks explores the deeper meaning behind the everyday. Hicks' fascination, however, lies not in the ironies of society, but in what she describes as the "unstable conditions" of our urban surroundings and the imaginative potential of perceived reality. In Suspended Series, Hicks focuses her attention on the experience of driving across four Bay area bridges: the San Mateo Bridge (1), the San Francisco Bay Bridge (2), Dumbarton Bridge (3) and the Golden Gate Bridge (4) to consider themes of commuting, perception and propulsion. For Hicks, a bridge is an "ambiguous zone," a area that hovers between two lands. In these works, a mundane everyday commute becomes a breakdown of the line between the real and the fantastical.