Suburban Driveways

The hardest thing about working on a personal project isn’t the creative part. It’s finding the mental space to care about it when everything else is on fire.

Suburban Driveways opens next week at MEDIUM Art Center. It’s a group photography show among friends: Rob Beckstrom, Jeremy Ronco, Tim Mitchell, Meredith Hudson, and me. All film, all displayed the same way. The kind of show you plan because it feels doable. Four frames per artist. One idea. One wall.

We photographed fences, garages, and cracked sidewalks. A rusty wall. An abandoned building. Things easily overlooked or left behind. Things that spoke to us.

The photos aren’t pretty. They’re honest and a little broken, which feels right for the moment we’re in.

I wish I could say the process was joyful, or that I had time to enjoy it. But my head is split between home and hospital. My mother’s health is worse. My father is still recovering from his stroke. Every day, there are forms to fill out, calls to make, or some new piece of information to take in.

Still, curating this show gave me something solid to hold onto, even when the rest of life felt like it was falling apart.

This is the fourth anniversary of the MEDIUM Art Center. We didn’t plan it that way, but it lines up. An ending to another year and the beginning of a new chapter.

For now, there is this show. These twenty pictures. Five friends pointing their lenses at scenes no one asked for. A zine featuring the work will also be available for sale at the opening.

There is no statement of purpose. No artist talks. No deep backstory.

Only a few prints, hung evenly, for you to stand in front of. A quiet reminder that space is what we make of it, and meaning shows up in the margins, right where I like it.

Rob included a quote from Kurt Vonnegut in the zine he created, and I think it captures the essence of the show: “There is no inside here. There is no outside here. To pass through the gates in either direction is to go from nowhere to nowhere and everywhere to everywhere.” I think that says it all.

See you next week.

-c-