After eight years of taking road trips and photos, Al Wildey's piece titled "Not a Destination" will be featured in ArtPrize, an international art competition hosted in Grand Rapids.

The art department faculty member's photos is one entry in a sea of 1,537 located at 174 venues around Grand Rapids.

Wildey started working on the piece in 2006 and finished it. The piece is composed of 50 images printed on aluminum on an eight-foot-wide grid.

The Ralph Emerson quote, "Life is a journey, not a destination," inspired Wildey's title for the project.

"In 2006, I took a road trip from Michigan to Idaho, and this is the first time I tried this process," he said. "I take a camera, and I mount it in the car, and I take some photographs."

Wildey said when he was driving on that trip, he was thinking of merging photos together as a record of the journey.

Wildey said that some of the images are only composed of 25 photos while the largest one has 2,500. All the photos Wildey took for "Not a Destination" were taken in his car with the camera facing the windshield.

He took 300 photos on that trip. When he got home, he layered all the photos in Photoshop to create a single image. Widely said he found the image to be intriguing and decided to do it with other journeys.

"It challenges what you expect from photography," he said. "It doesn't give a clear, single image, even though they are in there."

To create the piece, Wildey drove in all 50 states, but he said not one image represents a single state.

"There are three images that I qualify as general America road trips where I traveled over 4,000 miles in a single road trip," he said.

He made most of these road trips by himself, Wildey said, but occasionally would take them with a family member including his wife and youngest son.

"When I take the trips by myself, I am just worried about what is down the road, and what I am going to take a photograph of," Widely said. "I don't do it that I just take a photo every five miles, I take one when I find something I like."

The final states he went to were Alaska and Hawaii after the spring 2014 story ended.

Widely said that the road trips were expensed by himself and internal grants from the university. He also won the new Seed grant provided by ArtPrize.

Kevin Buist, director of exhibitions of ArtPrize, said that this was the first year that they have given out the grants. The organization received 214 applications. Only 25 artists received one of the $2,000 grants.

Buist said that the advisory board for the grant based their decision both on financial need, and artistic merit.

According to an April 23 press release from ArtPrize, the advisory board included Nicole Caruth, writer, editor and curator of Art21 Magazine in New York and Lisa Freiman, Director of Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond.

"Not a Destination" premiered in Art Walk Central on August 1. Kara Kinsman, education and programming chair of Art Reach of Mid Michigan, said she found the piece interesting when she saw it at the event.

"He put so much work and effort into going on all these trips," Kinsman said. "It really paid off."

"Not a Destination" will be featured through Oct. 12 at Devos Place at 303 Monroe Ave NW, Grand Rapids.