The exhibition On the Road takes its title from the legendary book by American poet and novelist Jack Kerouac, which describes the author's adventurous road trip across the United States in the late 1940s. The exhibition investigates the myth of the American road trip as it started to develop from the early 1920s onwards due to the immense expansions of highways and roads, particularly in the West of the country. On the Road explores the fascination that artists, especially in the Southwest, have had for a culture that emerged in between highways, gas stations, diners, and motels and examines how much they influence a particular iconography.

On the Road consists of two interrelated parts: Part one presents the practices of artists known for their images related to the exploration of the West via automobile. These are classic examples of works made in response to the emergence of a culture increasingly dependent on cars. The second part is the result of an actual, two-week long, road trip undertaken prior to the exhibition opening. The curator will explore the region between Mexico and the states of Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico. During the trip, a large number of artists and museums will be visited and artworks as well as artifacts will be collected for the exhibition. The curator's road trip and his research will function as a path through the exhibition. Found objects and materials will be presented alongside the works of art and a number of diary entries by the curator describing his experiences on the road. A series of quotes taken from classic road trip novels and books such as Simone de Beauvoir's America Day by Day, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley: In Search of America and William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways will be displayed on the gallery walls as vinyl texts. As an extension of the exhibition a series of films depicting the history of the Southwest and movies about road trips will be presented.

More than looking at the idea of the road trip from a nostalgic point of view, On the Road explores the idea of the road trip as a rite of passage, a journey towards liberation and emancipation on the way to a destination that is largely unknown but that holds the promise of freedom and self-discovery.

The second artist to be featured in Artpace's year-long WindowWorks tribute to past residents, Ken Little's (IAIR 95.4) sculptures explore the symbolic connotations of varying and somewhat unorthodox materials. Items of taxidermy modeled by leather apparel, articles of clothing tailored from dollar bills, a house walled by the pages of a bible…his work questions the identity of the subject by replacing its literal surface with a symbolic one. As he assembles these objects, the symbolic meanings clash with each other and with the whole of the sculpture, setting into motion a cycle of reinvention that attacks the viewer with a multitude of possible meanings. Little's guiding aesthetic is an act of constant questioning, one that redefines his sculptures in their entirety, from the smallest individual object to the very essence of their subject.

Houston artist Jamal Cyrus explores the construction of histories through deconstruction and reconstruction of oral, visual, and textual sources. Cyrus's narratives-both real and fictional-examine the prismatic world of Popular culture in search of its underlying realities or hidden meanings. In his Pride Record series, Cyrus tells the story of an independent record label, which, because of the function its music plays in politicizing urban working class youth, becomes a target of the FBI's Counterintelligence Program.

Elements of nature permeate much of New York artist Corey McCorkle's work, whether it is the fields of a garden or the angle of the Earth's axis. His projects, which explore the ideas of isolation and the ideals of Utopia, have been exhibited both in the United States and Europe. McCorkle develops these works through spatial modification and a variety of scrupulously crafted mediums, including sculpture, photography, and video production. For his 2007 Maccarone gallery installation, When a Dog Barks, The Response in the Ear of the Sky is a Star, McCorkle showcased the ruins of an abandoned zoo on the outskirts of Istanbul, highlighting the lost hopes for the city's overoptimistic plans for revitalization.

Polish artist Monika Sosnowska creates architecturally influenced sculptures and installations that disrupt the viewer's conventional perception and experience of space. Sosnowska's crunched, twisted, and mangled sculptures recall the formal appearance of Minimal art of the 1960s and 1970s, which featured works that oscillated between functional object and sculpture. Often the artist conceives her distorted and disorienting works for a particular space or event. At the 2007 Venice Biennale, Sosnowska wedged a crumpled steel skeleton of a modernist-era building inside the Polish Pavilion, turning a symbol of Eastern European institutional architecture into a flaccid sculptural mass.