RURAL is a site-specific publication series and art project documenting conversations and experiences with people living in rural communities. It explores lived experience framed by these questions: How does where we live shape our reality and impact how we relate to ourselves, our communities, the environment, our politics, and the ways we are creative? How can urban and rural people build mutually beneficial relationships, and what role does tourism potentially have in cultivating that kind of conscious interdependence?

This series of books about people and place is less about definitively answering those questions and more about spending time with them. It is a social practice that explores concepts of caring, contradiction, interdependence, otherness, and our various interpretations of freedom. It is a glimpse into some of the lives that help form and inform a place, and how a place shapes its people. Each book focuses on the experiences of specific individuals and is not meant to represent the community as a whole. Hopefully, it will serve as a generative primer for building mutually beneficial relationships between people on both sides of the urban/rural divide (and those who straddle the two worlds).

This project has multiple audiences: locals, tourists (often from urban places), and people who live in other rural communities throughout North America. I place myself as an artist-in-residence in a place of lodging in each community. The books live in the rooms of these places, and each interview participant becomes a free subscriber, receiving copies of all past and future issues. A copy of each issue is also donated to the community’s library.

The RURAL series is a proposal for engagement. It started after the 2016 election, in response to witnessing a growing narrative of division trickling into the mainstream, pitting rural and urban communities against each other. This binary framing left no room for nuance or understanding, and, from my perspective, presented no positive path forward. I felt I needed to move beyond my social and cultural boundaries and talk to people myself. My aim is to engage with local cultures, listen, and exchange stories from our respective realities to try and understand the discordant atmosphere. The book documents the project and offers the local community a reverent reflection of their experiences and wisdom, while creating an opportunity for visitors to form a deeper understanding and connection to these places and people.