Country Road

Our newest header photograph comes from Jason LaFerra's first solo show, to happen in New York this July.

As the artist explains:

The textures and contours of old maps are fascinating, even the tattered and stained parts. In this series, I digitally manipulate cartographic materials to create fauna, mostly birds, in poses reminiscent of field guides from a similarly early era of publication. The patterns of forests and shores often become an animal's feathers or fur, while the rings of topography often trace out wings or antlers.

These remind me of an Audubon Society series of books we used to get when I was younger, each volume focusing on some different aspect of the natural world: birds of north america, reptiles, insects, etc.  I always loved thumbing through them and thinking: "Oh... next time I see a scorpion I'll remember this bizarrely random fact," but I never did. The weather one was always my favorite, though, because there was an amazing section of pictures devoted to natural snow and ice sculptures that always seemed so fascinatingly alien to me.