Passenger

2017 _ wood, acrylic, ink, paper, texts

A handful of people, for a brief moment, share a common activity. People from different places, from different countries, from different dwellings, from different cultures and languages. People from different times, of different ages, from different childhoods and upbringings, from different educational and financial backgrounds. People with different personalities, beliefs, goals, and dreams. People with distant, disparate pasts and distant, disparate futures. For the length of a bus ride, a handful of these different people share a common direction, a common movement. And then they part ways.

Passenger is an ongoing project documenting brief moments of interaction between passengers on public transit in the Waterloo region of Ontario. Over several years, hundreds of drawings of passengers have been created and collected, along with brief passages expanding on instinctive impressions of the lives of those passengers in the moment of connection. These impressions explore our most basic perspectives and judgements of other people.

A manifestation of the work was presented as part of Folio: A Sketchbook Exhibition at Button Factory Arts in July of 2017. Included were a small selection of curated materials from the project, including 27 sketches and 13 accompanying text passages.