“Private Road”, an installation by Susan Meyer, references interior and exterior space in an environment that alludes to the American roadside panorama. Visuals relate to the actual, the imagined, the remembered and the forgotten. The piece is meant as a musing on the nature, at once fragmentary and cohesive, of visual language.

Greil Marcus, in his essay “The Old, Weird America”, writes, of Clarence Ashley’s 1929 Columbia recording of “The Coo Coo Bird”, “What appears to be a singer’s random assemblage of fragments to fit a certain melody line may be, for that singer, an assemblage of fragments that melody called forth. It may be a sermon delivered by the singer’s subconscious, his second mind. It may be a heretic’s way of saying what could never be said out loud, a mask over a boiling face.

The verse can only communicate as a secret everybody already knows, or as an allusion to a body of language the singer knows can never be recovered, and Ashley only makes things worse by singing as if whatever he’s singing about is the most obvious thing in the world. The performance doesn’t seem like a jumble of fragments. Rather there is a theme: displacement, restlessness, homelessness, the comic worry of “a people”…”