photo by Jack Christian (c) 2004
		In the summer of 2004, a strange and peculiarly American vehicle known as the Dead-Car Wagon made a slow southward crossing, departing from the gates of a rural Virginia speedway and heading toward the Carolina border, to ends its journey in an empty church parking lot in Eden, N.C. As an incarnation, the Dead-Car Wagon's physical form was resurrected from the stripped body of a 1980 Ford Pinto, which was pulled by a team of American Spotted Asses and piloted by two human drivers. Along the rural Southern back roads and county routes, this vehicle - heavy with a load of cultural history - rattled on for three days: an image-in-motion presented as a meditation on the American sense of place and passage, in light of car culture and suburban sprawl, colonialism and Manifest Destiny, and in remembrance of the kinds of wayside exchanges that are impossible when all places, along with the communities and ecologies they contain, are nothing but terminal blurs in the windshield glass. The Dead-Car Crossing rolled out in collaboration with Jack Christian, Aliass, Bronson, and Passenger, with the engineering brilliance of Fred Taylor and the generosity of Cheryl Haas, and  with funding support from the Gunk Foundation (www.gunk.org/). Special thanks to Warren, Bill, and Melinda Christian, and the families and communities of Henry and Rockingham Counties, especially the Harrises and Bertha Granny Lankford of Ridgeway.
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