Joel Leshefka spends his Seattle days running two retail/art spaces, completing absolutely mundane tasks such as: filing taxes, organizing employee schedules, purchasing toilet paper and plastic cups for art openings, paying license, insurance, and city fees, doing more taxes, sweeping cigarette butts off of the sidewalk, sending out press releases, battling with storage of off-season clothing, telling bands how to arrive via I-5, managing email lists & and going to the bank to get change.
What he really loves...is to get in his car and spend weeks in every corner of the Western United States. Where space is unlimited and buildings aren't torn down, they're just abandoned...
The early advocates of Manifest Destiny probably figured this out somewhere in South Dakota, then continued to have their minds blown through Wyoming, Utah, and all the way to the Oregon Coast. The few that headed south to New Mexico and Arizona, must have felt like they were on another planet. For a kid that grew up in the Northwest, surrounded by lush mountains and trees that always seem to be in the way, Joel Leshefka is consistently reinvigorated to find that the West is mostly still the same as those first explorers found it...
It's unruly, it's isolating and off-putting, inconvenient, and utterly cinematic in it's beauty...any human on this earth can still get lost in the West. This series of photographs document some of his travels.
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