Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford

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About this event

Hike You! is a six-year collaboration between Rockford, Illinois poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg and photographer Ryan Davis, pairing photographs made while walking through Rockford with original haiku inspired by the same landscape. The exhibition brings together 24 works created through sustained attention to the streets, riverbanks, paths, weather, architecture, animals, discarded objects, and overlooked details of an ordinary Midwestern city. The project grew from years of walking and looking closely at the places people pass every day. Davis’s photographs and Vaultonburg’s haiku approach the city not simply as subject matter but as a landscape capable of continual transformation—the ordinary becoming strange, funny, beautiful, melancholy, or briefly mysterious. The work connects with Vaultonburg’s broader approach to contemporary American haiku, which he calls Prairie Zen: a practice of attention rooted in the actual Midwestern landscape rather than an idealized wilderness. Vaultonburg is the author of Vanished Roads (Wolf Twin Books, 2026), a collection of haiku and short poetry exploring many of the same concerns with landscape, memory, transformation, humor, and the extraordinary possibilities of ordinary things. Learn more about Vanished Roads: https://www.wolftwin.com/product-page/vanished-roads Hike You! will be presented during Fall ArtScene, October 2–3, 2026, at RevHaus in Rockford, Illinois. The exhibition also offers a preview of the forthcoming Hike You! book.

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