Cynthia Daignault

In 2014, American painter Cynthia Daignault (born 1978) traveled around the entire outside border of the USA, stopping roughly every 25 miles to paint the view before her. The resulting monumental work, Light Atlas, is a grand portrait of America in 360 canvases that reveal slow shifts in hue, atmosphere, depth, industry and economy.

This catalog reproduces every painting of Light Atlas at 1:1 scale, in a filmic retelling of her journey and of the country she circled. Daignault weaves a dense narrative, intercutting parallel stories of the journey, the creation of the work and the grander fiction of America itself. New essays were commissioned for the book by celebrated historians and writers Alexander Nemerov and David Campany, approaching the piece both in its relationship to the history of painting and photography.