Canadian artist Emily Carr once said, “You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.” This observation seems more piercingly accurate now, in our 21st century reality, than it was in Carr’s early 20th century reality. If we consider how individuals connect and how their connections evolve into community, we may extend that thinking toward how to facilitate those connections—those sparks—through which individuals who know very little about each other realize they indeed share something in common, in sometimes unexpected or surprising ways.
Through the medium of photography, YOU:PLURAL aims to create that spark of connection in an all-inclusive way. Beginning with everyone in our neighborhood—E14 and E15, including the Media Lab, CBA, CMS, and ACT—and hopefully beyond, we invite you to explore connections to people you may often see but don’t know well. (And we will help you!) We will then document those nascent connections as photographic images and associated metadata. These collected portraits will be displayed as part of our first show on the Civic Media ArtCube in early 2019.
If you’re interested in building and enhancing community here in E14 and E15 and want to have fun in the process, let us know. We’d love to hear your ideas for making creative, compelling images of our community.
—Cindy Bishop + Lorrie LeJeune