Image: “Restricted | U.S. Air Force” by B.A. Van Sise from his “Elsewhere” series. “Time Travel” was written by Alida Rol for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2019, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
Comment from the artist, B.A. Van Sise: “Alida Rol brought a sense of visual thinking to the piece that was, as an artist, hard to pass up, building an interior world that feels palpable, rowdy to all senses: you can smell the asphalt, you can feel the dust on your fingers, you can hear the city disgorging its noise, sirens raising Cain as they bring people you don’t like to places you don’t want to be. It tells a tale we all know already—we scorn our mundane, seek out something better, something different, try to find beauty elsewhere. But it also gives the reader a lesson, surely unwanted but sorely needed: the grass isn’t always greener. In fact, the grass isn’t even green, and maybe there is, in the end, just no grass at all.”
