Wyoming Vista Third Place honor bittersweet

View of Wyoming after crossing Beartooth Mountains

“Wyoming Vista” was awarded Third Place in the Photography category at the 2022 Fall Open Show scheduled Sept. 4-25 in the Covered Bridge Art Association Gallery at Rockville, Indiana. Thank you to ISU professor emeritus of art David Erickson, the show judge.

This awe-inspiring landscape from a 2020 motorcycle ride through the Beartooth Mountains with my Leroy is a dye sublimation print on aluminum and float-mounted off white acrylic.

I lost my Leroy to cancer August 24, so remembering one of the many experiences we shared in our 20 years together is now bittersweet.

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Gephyrophobia

Excited to share that my artwork, “Approaching Fear Head-On,” received 3rd Place in the 14th Annual Juried Exhibition hosted Aug. 5 through 31 by River City Art Association in First Financial Bank in downtown Terre Haute, Indiana.

This piece also will be featured in the exhibition’s Winners Show throughout September in First Financial’s Springhill branch.

Each high gloss 8 by 10 image is printed on aluminum and float mounted as a triptych on brushed aluminum background.

Initially the lines of the bridge over the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky, into Indiana, grabbed my attention for a future photography show, but then I did what I like to do best and that’s to turn one of my traditional photographs into photography-based abstract art.

After contorting the lines using a few photo editing techniques the road and bridge in the second image took on scary movement which then sparked the third image of the gloom and doom, fear and anxiety experienced by someone with the fear of crossing a bridge, and maybe intensified by the fear of heights and/or fear of water.

Myself, I’m OK with bridges, but I do not like heights or swimming in deep water (thalassophobia, defined on Wikipedia as the persistent fear of vast, deep, and often dark bodies of water that feel dangerous).

I looked up the phobia for the fear of crossing a bridge and up popped gephyrophobia, but as represented in my triptych, I preferred my title as a more courageous and positive outcome.

According to Wikipedia: Gephyrophobia is the anxiety disorder or specific phobia characterized by the fear of bridges and tunnels. As a result, sufferers of gephyrophobia may avoid routes that will take them over bridges, or if they are a passenger, will act very apprehensively when passing over a bridge. The term gephyrophobia comes from the Greek γέφυρα (gephura), meaning “bridge”, and φόβος (phobos), meaning “fear”.

Some possible manifestations of gephyrophobia may be fear of driving off the bridge, fear of a gust of wind blowing one off the bridge, or fear that the bridge will collapse when crossing it (e.g., fear that the bridge lacks structural integrity). The fear overlaps with acrophobia (the fear of heights) as gephyrophobia tends to be exacerbated in taller bridges as compared to those closer to the water or ground beneath.