This long-term works in progress are the transmissions of a citizen who seems comfortable sitting with the knowledge that he is as excited by his home as he is alarmed by it. The photographs are as much about the American roadside as they are the infinitely flat and delusional digital landscape, a place where reverence is arbitrarily distributed between the meaningful and meaningless components of our world, both existing and extinct.

If Christmas in America is a thematic and a visual exercise in American Maximalism, these images are deceptively nuanced photographs of—and for—an America that has done everything it can to abolish nuance, creating bleached-out stand-ins for the place itself. Here Jesse is using light as a tool and metaphor for the brazenness of current American politics— the lies have gotten bigger, more accepted, and seemingly without consequence. Illuminated for all to see.

It’s hard to ignore the current collective fear of losing one’s version of America—their way of life, the fear that it too is fleeting. It’s as if their concept of America is un-shareable. You will find images of implied loss, or as if something is missing or been plucked out of the frame. Erased.

Photographer: Jesse Rieser