Impasse, 2004










Impasse, 2004

These images incorporate incidents and encounters that come with being a bike rider: knowing people with only bike in common, different relations to the law; epiphanies, shifts, thoughts, memories that visit on a long ride; unwilling and forbidden passengers; still moments after bike and rider have separated.

Also the second skin: the helmet enlarges the head and obscures the face, jacket and gloves make the rider more imposing and machine-like - Darth Vader, spaceman or bank robber. Bike riding itself carries associations with mythologized historical figures: cowboys, highwaymen and knights in armour.

An impasse is a real or metaphorical place one arrives at that is the end-point of a certain trajectory but not a destination, not an end but a temporary stopping-place, a conundrum that may be productive in that it necessitates re-thinking or a change in direction.

An impasse is reached through accident or misfortune: when a bike hits the deck, a relationship founders, or when, in the unfolding of any narrative, expectations are cheated by a confounding element that, at least for the moment, seems to defy interpretation.