Tulsa, OK

Show Times Monday through Friday 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. and during Chapman Music Hall Events   
Venue PAC Gallery
Presenter Darshan Phillips and Friends
Tickets FREE

Photographs by Lance Miller, Darshan Phillips, and Matt Sawyer

Artist’s Statement:
Highway 412 is an exhibition of photographs produced during a short road trip into the panhandle of Oklahoma and Northeastern New Mexico. A route following Highway 412, and as often the quiet dirt roads near it, placed us on windswept plains, in small towns and under dark skies. We used the route as much as a means to be lost as to arrive at a destination. Appropriately, much of the terrain was familiar to us only from childhood road trips, in which this sort of landscape would inevitably have prompted the question “are we there yet?” It was precisely these landscapes and towns, usually bypassed by travelers en route to more popular destinations, that we set out to photograph. We sought landscapes without monuments, tourist attractions, and scenic outlooks. We sought a landscape that challenged us to make something of its blank canvas, to find patterns and rhythms in its vastness, and to look more closely at an area we thought we knew. This exhibition is the result of a trip to nowhere in particular, a rambling photographic journey that highlights our particular interests and approaches in spite of a uniformity in subject.

U.S. Route 412 is an east-west United States highway, first commissioned in 1982. Its route number is a “violation” of the usual AASHTO numbering scheme, as it comes nowhere near its implied “parent”, US 12. U.S. 412 overlaps expressway-grade Cimarron Turnpike from Tulsa west to Interstate 35 and the Cherokee Turnpike from 5 miles west of Chouteau, Oklahoma, to 8 miles west of the Arkansas state line. U.S. 412 has a bannered route in eastern Oklahoma named Scenic US 412, one of only two such routes in the country. Another curiosity of this highway is that it runs the entire length of the Oklahoma Panhandle and traverses the Missouri Bootheel.

As of 2004^[update], the highway’s eastern terminus is in Columbia, Tennessee at an intersection with Interstate 65, where it continues east as State Route 99. Its western terminus is in Springer, New Mexico at an intersection with Interstate 25