By: David Avery

Medium: Etching
Year: 2011
EditionSize: 30
ImageSize: 5 x 12 inches

A Ticket to Ride by David Avery is a finely detailed surreal etching that stages a nightmarish journey through a mechanized landscape of motion, control, and fate. The central figure—a helmeted rider mounted on a skeletal, machine-like horse—moves along a rail track toward an uncertain destination, propelled as much by unseen forces as by will.

Avery layers the image with symbolic fragments: instruments, debris, and architectural remnants hover and collide, while the track itself becomes a metaphor for inevitability. The rider’s rigid posture and the hybrid construction of the mount suggest a tension between human agency and mechanical determinism, a recurring theme in Avery’s work.