Every painting in Conjunctions before this one took its name from something that was here before we were—blue water, a red shore, a black sun. This one is named for a thing the highway department built. The joke only works because the painting was already halfway there before I noticed.

The square divides into four fields: night black, brake-light red, deep oxblood, and a cold blue morning. They meet at a gold cruciform that will read as a starburst if you are looking for astronomy and as a stack interchange with its flyover ramps if you are looking for Austin. I did not choose between those readings and I would rather you didn’t either. The large black orb rimmed in white sits on the hottest red on the canvas—the authority in the composition, the thing everything else answers to. Two red bodies burn inside gold coronas. Smaller ones drift at the outer edges of each quadrant, half in one field and half in the next.

What a conjunction actually is: two bodies that appear to meet, from one particular vantage, for a short while, and then do not. That is also a description of an interchange at rush hour. Thousands of people pass within a few feet of one another at seventy miles an hour, aligned briefly and perfectly, none of them meeting. It is the least romantic place I can think of and the most accurate picture of how most of our alignments actually go.

Painted in acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas, edges painted through and sealed with matte varnish, ready to hang without a frame. Signed on the front; signed, titled, and catalogued on the verso.