With a little help from her cellphone and her husband who drove the car, a local artist has captured the act of making a journey and turned it into series of images for public display.

Last summer, in a day of travel from her hometown of Saskatoon, SK, to her current town of Coleman, AB, Crowsnest artist Donna Bilyk decided to position her cellphone out the passenger window of her vehicle and begin capturing photographs continuously throughout the 840-kilometre journey.

Whatever she captured was left up to chance as the vehicle cruised along the highway. She was left with thousands of images by the time she reached Coleman.

“I kept touching the screen, just my finger all the way. It was constant. And I didn’t look at any of the images, I didn’t even check, I didn’t want to know,” said Bilyk. “And then it was going through the images. It was really hard to narrow it down… but it worked out.”

The thousands of photographs she captured feature about everything you might see from the window of your car between here and Saskatchewan; vast featureless plains, the subtleties of the foothills, the wind turbines near Pincher Creek.

Bilyk turned the journey into an exhibition made up of a series of photographic slices of the landscape.

The collection, called A Photographic Journey From Home, is made up of 70 images. She’s chosen 30 for small frames, two for medium frames and two large ones for the front windows of Artist’s Touch Custom Picture Framing business in Coleman.

“It was a neat experiment,” said Bilyk. “That connection to the journey back. I’m always going through that stretch of highway and through that landscape.”

Donna Bilyk held the opening reception for the collection on July 22. The exhibition will be up until September.