Through sculpture, video, and photography, Shelby Roberts has spent over thirty years peering into and stabbing at the darker corners of American Life.  In this suite of images, Roberts looks plainly and empathetically at the state of the country. Focused on human interventions that express a decidedly post-vernacular view, this work squeezes out the simplified attraction to roadside curiosities revealing a persistent condition that is contemporary by subject and timely through topic.  Roberts’ work is informed by questions of an American identity, deservedly so, and acts as a clear challenge in which he uses his unique capacity to build an interlocked perspective on past and present.  Fostered in part through a youthful experience of a more vacant Oklahoma and an adult life spent in complex urban environments, Roberts presses a conversation that photographic representation is not fixed to the past but is expanded by the conversations of the present.

-  Andrew Freeman