Child with Mask, Hillrose, Colorado, 1989

An unsettling portrait? Or a child playing dress-up? A hockey mask obscures the face of a young child riding a bike on a dusty back-road.

Omerod's photographs are understated, but show an unseen America, where the industrial heartland is decaying, highways stand empty and towns are deserted. The subjects of Ormerod’s work are the disenfranchised. A teenager cycles through her neighbourhood wearing a Halloween-style hockey mask, a Native American man stands in a graveyard, their expressions are unreadable.

The work subverts traditional American icons. A white picket fence is staved in, a huge billboard for Miss Teen Dakota USA stands next to an empty highway. Inverting the famous Hollywood sign, Ormerod photographs a Texaco sign from the back, dominating the empty, Western landscape.

The works also show humour – a giant fake dinosaur looms in the distance of a desert landscape, a stuffed moose head is displayed in the window of a diner. The subjects of the work are unconventional, surreal and sometimes mundane, but create an atmosphere of an eerie backwater America.