The Quest


Kenneth Ragsdale
The Quest
Foam board and paper
2007-2009

It is natural that any traveler, regardless of their immediate circumstances, should fantasize about what might lie ahead, while at the same time recalling the places they’ve left behind. In The Quest, Kenneth Ragsdale conjures a nostalgic portrait of the classic family voyage with his half-scale model of a 1965 Vista Cruiser station wagon towing a 1950’s style travel trailer. The large-scale drawing is a two-dimensional pattern for the vehicles, which reveals their careful linear construction. An unfamiliar shape contained within that drawing is what Ragsdale describes as a ‘monster,’ a common entity in his work that hovers over homes, vehicles, fields and trees. This ambiguous form personifies the murky abstraction of memory and time that separates us from one another. While much of this work examines the elusiveness of memory, it is reconstructed here with razor-sharp precision. Foam-board sections, like past events, are folded in on one another, interlocking to create forms that rise up out of their flat repose and take on shapes that chronicle traveling through time.