Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford is a collaborative exhibition by poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg and photographer Ryan Davis, presented at RevHaus during Rockford Fall ArtScene 2026.
Created over six years of walking through Rockford, Illinois, the project pairs Davis’s photographs with Vaultonburg’s haiku, inspired by encounters along the way. Streets, alleys, riverbanks, weather, wildlife, abandoned objects, industrial remnants, and overlooked details of the everyday landscape become the subjects of twenty-four photograph-and-poem pairings.
Rather than functioning as captions, the haiku offer a second way of encountering each photograph, exploring place, memory, attention, and the intersections between the urban and natural worlds. The project also reflects Vaultonburg’s developing idea of “Prairie Zen,” a Midwestern practice of attention rooted in close observation of the ordinary landscape.
Hike You! is free and open to the public as part of Rockford Fall ArtScene 2026.