Rights of Passage
1995–98

Rosler's series Rights of Passage, taken with a fixed-focus toy camera, captures the anonymous, unlovely spaces through which she passes while commuting between Brooklyn and New Jersey. Bridges and overpasses, trucks and cars form dreamscapes that, she notes, are unique to our era, like "nothing previously imagined." The American road network links not only geography but an economic system in which we, eternal transients, are enmeshed. To be on the road is not the embodiment of footloose liberty, but an experience familiar to all for its concrete condition of stasis: the traffic jam, whether one is flying along or literally stuck.

“In Martha Rosler’s Rights of Passage series, all such freedom of movement, real or conceptual, is blocked: by traffic, by the endless process of roadwork, by deteriorating surfaces and margins, by the inexorable sameness of the modern highway landscape that turns all travel into arrival at the same destination.” – Anthony Vidler