Highway Salvation/Our Yearly Visit

This is article three in a series of works using ruined/rejected clothing and apparel as canvas, and the last in the series for the foreseeable future.  The canvas this time is a pair of jeans ruined by pen explosion while visiting a Civil War graveyard.  Whether or not this visit caused the explosion will remain a mystery, as I am unwilling to lose more pants tempting the supernatural.

The pants are three layers of papier-mâché: two layers of newspaper and one layer of road maps.  As with the previous works, stencils were used to write text with acrylic paint.  The finished product is rigid and unwearable.  While the pants started out ironed flat, after three rounds of drying the paper began to warp and the surface developed a relief-like texture.

On Highway Salvation, the front page of thirty different highway maps were plastered on the pants and then painted with yellow and purple watercolor.  The yellow-white stenciled text reads:

DYING TO DYE
LYING TO LIE
TRYING TO TRY

THE MARKERS WHIP PAST
ON HIGHWAYS OF FLIGHT,
A TRUTH ETCHED ON
EVERY BACK SIDE

Our Yearly Visit was made using the same methods and uses cut up strips of two different road maps.  The left leg uses a map of the of the eastern half of the United States and the right leg uses a Shell Oil map of New Jersey from the late 60's.  The right pocket features Newark and its neighboring cities while the left pocket features a legend from a 1970's map of Pennsylvania, detailing the state flower, the state dog, the state tree, and so on.  On the bottom half of the left pant leg, text is written in red Sharpie marker.  It reads:

You do just enough to keep me away.
You answer your phone during dinner;
make fun of the woman at table 12A.

And now my van makes towards northern woods
as radios memory repeats the scene
of the solice of the bedroom
and the closeness of our egos,
hollow eggshells touching together
on the busy metro streets.

And right then, I wish that just once,
after all these years,
I'd stop looking for flaws
and let myself be hurt again.

Higher up on the right leg, text is stenciled in red acyllic paint.  It reads:

BUT
YOU DON'T TEMPT
A DRUG