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, 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 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 impulse of place-naming to landscapes outside the conventional canon of scenic America.