Located in downtown Odessa, TX, Big Skies consists of four printed vinyl-covered traffic boxes. The images are an imaginative visual metaphor for life in Odessa: the big sky, the flatness of the land, the dryness, oil rigs, nature, and the self-reliance of its people. Odessa’s geographical isolation and limited population makes it hard for arts, culture, and commerce to easily thrive. People are thrown on their own resources and much of life is lived internally. Big Skies uses the visual language of layers, transparency, movement, space, spatial illusion, imagery, abstraction, repetition, and geometry to refer poetically, referentially, to the life we live in our bodies, in our hearts, within our brains, and in our souls. It propounds the notion that life – like an iceberg – exists mostly under the surface.

Commissioned by: Odessa Council for the Arts & Humanities

Installed: 2016

Photographer: Steve Goff