The Survivors:
An archaeological and photographic journey of people and their prosthetic extensions of happiness in an abandoned and despondent America.
Fall 2015
CASA Arts Centre, Lethbridge, Alberta
It must have been 6 months into my first year of kindergarten when I took my maiden stroll into a girls’ washroom. Situated in the basement of a United Church, in a small town in Northern Alberta, this room fascinated me. It was a strangely familiar second planet. It looked almost exactly like the boys washroom, but it had an extra stall. The room’s odor, too, was incredibly close to the one I was used to, but then again it was slightly different.
This early dabbling with cross-lavatorial investigative exploration was probably the source of my first flash of titillation by means of crossing over into less comfortable worlds, and it likely triggered the start of my lifelong sneakiness and the clandestine search for peeks and probes into other lives, however mildly different from my own life. Over the last few years, America and its absurd subcultural miscellany has become a magnificent women’s washroom into which I have ventured repeatedly.
For generations America established itself as the centre of the economic universe and this richness and the entrepreneurial spirit took hold and ventured into each region, manifesting itself in some quite peculiar ways. As these tiny cultures started to grow into collections of eccentrics, rebel rousers, and religious fanatics, something unexpected occurred.
The America everyone loved, collapsed.
It died — leaving only a few bizarre remaining survivors with the struggle.
And I was there as an embedded rubberneck, to collect pieces of them before they went down the drain.
This exhibition is a portion of my documentation through artifacts demonstrating the decayed prosthetic extensions of economic and cultural success, surrounded by photos of some of the survivors I’ve met in the process, and tied together with a video battery of dozens of interviews with cultural leaders and citizen-characters explaining both how their world has or will end, and their memories of happiness.
It is my absolute pleasure to bring you into my America.
The Video Battery
As part of the installation, a video battery was set up, with positive narrative from street interviewees reminiscing of the greatest time of their lives being played on one end of the gallery and a negative narrative being played on the opposite end with cult members, leaders within subcultures, eccentrics, and barflies foretelling predictions of how the world may come to an end. The following two links will lead you into this +/- battery.
Featured Survivors
click here for a gallery of the Survivors.
The Survivors Promo videos.
click here to view fun promo videos
Media Coverage