Rural Son and They’re Here

Rural Son and They’re Here

by Tytia Habing

Exhibition Dates: October 20205 – October 2026

Location: Post-Security, E Concourse

Rural Son
When my son was three and a half, my family was living in the Cayman Islands. Because of rising costs, an uptick in crime and the fact that we had no family nearby, my husband and I decided to pick up and move back to southern Illinois among sprawling corn and bean fields and near my family. I was back to where I started, and only a quarter mile down the road from where I grew up and where my parents still live on the family farm. Immediately upon our arrival, I began photographing this series of images of my son living the ‘Midwest Dream.’

In the beginning, I was simply documenting my child’s life like any other mother would. It was a big, new, and exciting change for him. After a year of photographing his everyday life, I realized I had the beginnings of an ongoing project. In making these images, it’s my intention to not only document my son’s childhood, but to highlight a lifestyle that seems to be fading away all too quickly. Only fifteen percent of children in the United States now live in rural areas, and my son is one of these declining numbers. Not only that, but even rural children are staying indoors much more than children did in the past. Having wide-open spaces to explore, living close to nature and being afforded a modicum of independence as a young child was the norm for me growing up, so not only am I photographing my son’s present, I am photographing my past. As a child I played on the same land, swam in the same river, and walked the same dirt roads as he does now.

This collection of images, will take on new meaning as time progresses and the statistics of rural populations versus urban populations changes even more drastically. It is my hope to create an intimate and captivating record of rural life in Illinois as it is now, and hopefully encourage parents and their children to get out and connect with nature and the great outdoors no matter where they live.

They’re Here
“All my life I’ve wished to see a UFO, because I believe with every fiber of my being that they’re out there. To me, it seems utterly ridiculous to think we’re the only inhabitants in this vast universe. I’ve watched nearly every science fiction movie and TV series in existence, listened to hundreds of podcasts and watched a ridiculous amount of YouTube videos about UFOs. Not only has the New York Times done some explosive reporting on the existence of UFOs, the government has slowly begun to disclose, through congressional hearings, the fact that yes, they actually do exist. “On May 20th, 2021, my wish to see a UFO came true. I had finished a photography retreat in Wisconsin that morning with a good friend and after driving all day, I dropped her at the airport in Indianapolis. I was traveling east on I-70 and as I approached Terre Haute, Indiana I saw a large round, white/silver colored object hovering above the interstate ahead of me. It seemed almost blurry, or out of focus, so I quickly took my sunglasses off to hopefully see it better. My sunglasses were polarized and when I took them off, I could barely see it, so I quickly put them back on. The object was still slightly blurry, sort of pixelated looking, like a low-resolution photograph viewed large, but I continued to stare at it as I drove, barely taking my eyes off it to look at the road. After watching it for about a minute, it suddenly blinked out of existence, disappeared, and just like that, my UFO experience was over. Though it was anticlimactic, I hope to see more.

“The mixed media works in this series of digital prints with gold and silver leaf are my artistic interpretations of specific UFO stories or experiences I read or heard about.”