Where I'm From


	"Where I'm From"

	soil and debris, property marking stakes, photo transparencies (2001)

	This installation pulls together fifty suburban neighborhood entrance signs from Collierville, Tennessee. During the time that I lived in this area, now a major Eastern suburb of Memphis, the town rivaled Franklin, TN as the state's fastest developing suburban community. What started as a trainstop in 1870 has now exploded into a small city sprawled across the remnants of farms and wetlands that were there less than a decade ago. New houses and neighborhoods are built rapidly, and with this growth each real estate developer tries to separate their cookie-cutter properties from the next. One of the simplest ways to do this (besides erecting walls and gates around the development perimeter) is to label the various projects with cozy-sounding or stately titles, often on brick or stone entrance signs at the thresholds of these burgeoning "communities". The images suspended over the demarcated soil in this installation are transparent photos of every one of those entrances as they stood in 2001. Below each drawing is a property boundary marking stake.
						above: installation view, 2001 below: details of transparencies and property stakes