Collaborators

Common Box Project

While reading John Common’s lyrics and listening to his music, I found myself wanting to know more about the people in his neighborhood. Where did they come from? Where were they going? With those questions in mind,

I selected excerpts from his lyrics that made me want to know more, lyrics that made me want to find out whose experience was intertwined in his melody. The excerpts were then imbedded in images. Each image is one quadrant of a larger photograph, creating a slide of text and image that doubles as a puzzle piece. Each of the photographs that I chose were images that I had taken of locations that roused a strong sense of place.

After creating the lyric slides, I decided that I wanted to answer some of these questions for the viewer of the collaborative box project. I thought about the relationships formed by this project - there is John Common, the musician, Alicia Bailey, the curator-gallerist, me, the creator of the box and you, the viewer of the box. I thought about how this project connected us and how we each have a story to tell. I asked John and Alicia to share four specific thoughts, facts or memories from different points in their lives while I also came up with four from my life. These story pieces were imbedded in one quadrant of a map. When put together, these slides reveal the home state of each contributor.