Route 2, North Dakota

Route 2, North Dakota depicts the highway that traverses the northern tier of the state across the Great Plains — a subject that requires a printmaker to compose around vast horizontal space and minimal vertical incident. The print likely relies on a low horizon and a dominant sky rendered through [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi), with the road, telephone poles, or grain elevators providing scaled markers against the prairie. The challenge is one Shimizu's training prepares her for: Tokuriki's school treated landscape as a problem of essential lines and color zones rather than incidental detail. Working on [washi](/glossary/washi) with multiple color blocks, she translates the experience of driving an empty highway into the stillness of the printed sheet. The piece belongs to a strand of her practice that documents lesser-celebrated American geographies — interior plains, secondary highways, towns with small populations — applying the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) impulse of place-naming to landscapes outside the conventional canon of scenic America.