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Crossings
Crossings

Art & Design

Crossings

By Mike Zaro

Location
Nanuet
Category
Art & Design
Published
Aug 28, 2026

A mixed-media study of the bridge, the commute, and the distance between leaving home and arriving somewhere else.

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Crossings began with a question I could not answer from a map: when does a person actually leave Rockland? Is it when the house disappears in the mirror, when the road lifts above the river, or when the familiar shape of the Palisades becomes a backdrop instead of a boundary?

The bridge is usually described as infrastructure. It is measured in lanes, minutes, weather alerts, and traffic. But for the people who cross it repeatedly, it also becomes a private clock. The cables arrive in a familiar order. Light catches the river at a particular angle. A brake light ahead can mean ten lost minutes or an unexpected pause long enough to notice the water. Repetition turns engineering into ritual.

Reflections, repeated bridge lights, and the route home before sunrise.
Reflections, repeated bridge lights, and the route home before sunrise.

I built the first piece from that tension. The photographic fragments insist on a real place: concrete piers, the river, lanes bending toward the toll-era memory of the crossing. Over them, the black circle behaves like both a route and a return. It is too large to be contained by the bridge. The painted marks interrupt the photograph because memory interrupts the clean story we tell about movement. We say we are going from one side to another, but most crossings are less complete than that. Part of us remains in the place we left; part of the destination travels home with us.

The supporting work moves inside the vehicle. At predawn, glass becomes a second landscape. The bridge lights repeat across rain and reflection. Faces become traces. The red line is not a literal route. It records the emotional shape of the trip: anticipation, fatigue, delay, release, and the turn toward home.

Concrete, current, and the weight of the crossing seen from river level.
Concrete, current, and the weight of the crossing seen from river level.

Connection is never only a transportation fact.

— Crossings
An almost-empty aisle, wet glass, and the bridge arriving before the day does.
An almost-empty aisle, wet glass, and the bridge arriving before the day does.
Cable, current, lane, and return compressed into one circular field.
Cable, current, lane, and return compressed into one circular field.

This project is not an argument for or against commuting. It is an attempt to look carefully at an experience that can become invisible precisely because it happens so often. Rockland is connected to the region by roads, buses, rails, and bridges, but connection is never only a transportation fact. It is also time given away, work made possible, family schedules rearranged, and the daily practice of carrying one place into another.

About the creator

Mike Zaro

I design Rockland Connected. The Creatives wall — the type, the rooms, how a piece hangs — is the work. Built in Nanuet, for people making things in this county.

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