The starting point for this work was a long love affair with the small town restaurants and diners that I used visit on days off from tree planting or as stops during road trips across North America. These are places that presented a home -like atmosphere, while at the same time satisfied a need for anonymity and adventure. It was here that I could curl up with a coffee, eggs, bacon and toast, write in my journal, and stare out the window. These were spaces that felt simple, contemplative, and unencumbered by the constructs of everyday life; what the wheels of motion and driving unfurled in the mind were summed up and organized on the pages of my journal at the roadside diner. In the fall of 2006, I began photographing these places more deliberately with a 4”x5” and started to observe and collect other imagery that would help to weave the story of this transient existence. It was no longer just diners that formed the narrative, but also trailers, landscapes, and drive-ins. A jukebox that plays both records and compact discs gives a clue to the era that it is found in and makes a connection to postmodernism. A hotel sign on the side of the road is ominous in its welcome to the “Gateway” and is meant as a reference to the spiritual aspect of the journey. In many ways, my self, my identity, began to be formed the first moment I pulled out onto the highway in my dad’s station wagon and moved west to the mountains. The title You Will Want to Come Back is a direct reference to a sign that was posted on the side of the road as I left a town in southern British Columbia. I think the intention of the sign was to persuade visitors to return, but I couldn’t help but relate to its feeling of futility and foreboding. I chose this as the title of the work because it references both a nostalgic yearning for a more innocent period of time in my early twenties, and also in a broader sense to the belief that rural communities can offer a less cluttered and slower pace of life; a belief that can be seen in the recent trend of the financially capable persons purchasing vacation homes in small towns in the interior of B.C. As well, I wonder how this gas-powered transience that I strongly associate as a method of self discovery will be transformed as we see the golden age of the automobile gradually slip into the past. How strongly do these nostalgia memories affect our resistance to changing the way we live in the face of this reality? In many ways I see this series as a transitional body of work and as a starting place for a much larger period of research to come. I am interested in describing more in-depth the moods, concerns and landscapes of these expansive places and would like to extend my investigation to the Canadian prairies. In some ways the images I am creating feel lonely and void, and in others they are close and comfortable. I am striving to collect images that aren’t attached to any particular place or time but that will function as trigger points for a collective western Canadian subconscious. The work is presented as 40”x50” and 40”x40” sized light jet metallic colour prints, trans-mounted on to plexi glass. This work was graciously funded by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.