Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford
For more than six years, photographer Ryan Davis and I have been taking walks through Rockford.
That description is completely accurate, but it doesn't really explain Hike You!.
We began with a simple idea. We would start our walks from essentially the same place near the geographical center of Rockford and head in a different direction. Sometimes we had a destination in mind. Often we didn't. Ryan brought a camera. I brought the habit of looking at things as a poet. Then we walked.
Over six years, those walks accumulated into thousands of photographs, hundreds of haiku, a record of a friendship, and a portrait of Rockford that neither of us could have deliberately set out to create. This fall, a selection of that work will be exhibited as Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford, a collaborative exhibition by Ryan Davis and Thomas L. Vaultonburg at RevHaus during Fall ArtScene 2026.
The City at Walking Speed
There is a Rockford you experience from a car, and there is another Rockford you discover on foot.
Walking changes the scale of a city. Places that seem unrelated when you're driving between them turn out to be connected. Streets have transitions you don't notice at thirty-five miles an hour. An alley becomes as interesting as a major road. An abandoned building stops being part of the background and becomes an object with a history. You notice old signs painted on brick, strange objects caught in trees, flowers growing through concrete, forgotten staircases, railroad tracks, utility poles, river debris, vacant lots and the remains of businesses nobody has thought about for decades.
We walked past the Rockford everyone knows: the Faust Hotel, the Midway Theater, the Times Theatre, the Rock River and the old Register Star building. But those landmarks became only part of the project. We became equally interested in the things that weren't landmarks at all.
A discarded office chair in a window on Broadway could become a poem. A bicycle pulled from the Rock River and left standing in front of the former Rockford Register Star building could become an image about transition. A fading ghost sign on the side of a building could briefly become the most important thing we saw that day.
The ordinary kept refusing to remain ordinary.
Photography and Haiku
Ryan and I weren't trying to make photographs illustrate poems or poems explain photographs. That distinction became important.
Photography and haiku are both very good at paying attention, but they pay attention differently. A photograph can preserve an instant with enormous specificity. A haiku can take that same instant and move sideways into memory, association, humor, absence or something that can't actually be seen.
Sometimes Ryan would photograph something and a poem would occur to me immediately. Sometimes I wouldn't understand why an image mattered until much later. Sometimes the photograph and poem seemed to be looking at entirely different things even though they came from the same place and moment.
We learned not to force them together.
The best pairings created a third thing between them: something that belonged neither entirely to the photograph nor entirely to the poem.
Six Years Changes a City
When you repeatedly walk through the same city for six years, you also begin documenting time whether you intend to or not.
Buildings disappear. Businesses close. Murals appear. Trees come down. Construction fences go up. Something you photographed because it seemed mildly interesting one afternoon becomes historically interesting three years later because it no longer exists.
But the walkers change, too.
That became increasingly important to Hike You!.
The project began during one period of our lives and continued into another. Some of the places we encountered began to feel symbolic of that movement without either of us intending them to. The bicycle that came out of the Rock River is perhaps the clearest example. It was simply an object Ryan encountered and photographed, covered in river mud and standing improbably in front of the old newspaper building. But over time it came to represent something larger to us: an object emerging from one existence into another, battered and dirty but still recognizably itself.
That is part of what these walks became.
They weren't an attempt to escape Rockford. They were an attempt to see what was already here.
The Rockford We Found
There is a tendency to believe that discovery requires travel. We imagine that interesting things are elsewhere and that familiar places have already revealed everything they contain.
Six years of walking around Rockford taught us almost exactly the opposite.
The more familiar the city became, the stranger it became.
We found hidden murals and remnants of old advertisements. We found architecture we'd passed hundreds of times without actually seeing. We found animals, weeds, industrial ruins, religious objects, graffiti, abandoned furniture and things neither of us could satisfactorily explain. We watched seasons repeat themselves over the same streets while nothing ever repeated itself exactly.
There is no exotic destination at the center of Hike You!.
The destination is attention.
The project is about what happens when you return to the same place often enough, slowly enough and openly enough that familiarity begins to break down. Eventually you stop seeing what you expect to see and begin noticing what is actually there.
That was when Rockford became mysterious again.
Hike You! at Fall ArtScene 2026
Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford will be exhibited at RevHaus, 1023 Harlem Road in Machesney Park, as part of Fall ArtScene 2026.
Fall ArtScene takes place Friday, October 2, from 5–9 p.m., and Saturday, October 3, from 4–9 p.m. ArtScene is presented by the Rockford Area Arts Council and is free and open to the public.
RevHaus describes itself as a creative automotive space where craftsmanship, design and art come together. For Fall ArtScene, the venue is bringing together artists working in photography, poetry, mixed media, reclaimed materials, woodworking and metalwork. Along with Hike You!, the venue will feature reclaimed metal and wood artwork by Oscar Pagles of Foraged and metalwork by Shayne Pagles of VinGogh, LLC, as well as live metalworking and woodworking demonstrations.
For Ryan and me, the exhibition is also a preview of the forthcoming Hike You! book, which will bring together photographs and haiku from the larger six-year project.
What Hike You! Is Really About
I suppose an artist statement is eventually supposed to explain what the art means.
After six years, I'm not sure I can reduce Hike You! to one meaning, and I'm glad I can't.
It is about Rockford. It is about friendship. It is about walking. It is about photography and haiku. It is about aging and time and places disappearing. It is about discovering that an object pulled out of a river can suddenly seem like a self-portrait. It is about looking at something you've seen a thousand times and, for reasons you can't entirely explain, seeing it for the first time.
Most of all, I think it is about attention.
A city doesn't have to be beautiful in the conventional sense to deserve attention. A moment doesn't have to be important to deserve preservation. A place doesn't have to be famous to contain mystery.
For six years, Ryan Davis and I walked through Rockford and paid attention.
Hike You! is what we brought back.
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