Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (and Boats and Bikes)

^{Alexa Hawksworth, Performance Red Integra, 2023, Oil on canvas, 120 x 60″ (L x H), Courtesy of the artist, Private collection}

In the 1987 film Planes, Trains and Automobiles, an ordinary trip home becomes an unexpected series of delays, missed connections, and detours. As the journey unravels, airports, highways, and hotels become settings for strong emotions: frustration, loneliness, grief and humour, leading to an unexpected friendship. The film suggests that we rarely remember travel as a sequence of routes and schedules. We remember what happened and how it felt.

Transportation is a practical system for moving people and things from one place to another, with infrastructure shaped by political, economic, and cultural circumstances. Yet travel is also an affective experience. Anticipation, wonder, desire, uncertainty, disappointment, nostalgia, and hope become attached to the vehicles we travel in, the routes we follow, and the destinations we imagine. The warmth of sunlight through a car window. The scent of a shoreline. The vibration of a train. Clouds drifting beneath an airplane. These sensory encounters become part of how we experience movement through the world.

The group exhibition Planes, Trains and Automobiles (and Bikes and Boats) brings together contemporary artworks that explore the affective dimensions of transportation and travel. The selected contemporary artists examine transportation as emotional, sensory, and imaginative experiences, revealing how journeys shape our perceptions, memories, and relationships to place. Together, the works reveal travel does not end with arrival. The experience of moving through the world lingers in the body and imagination, shaped by memory, culture, and place.