Homer’s Christina Whiting spent five years, during the COVID pandemic, travelling over 40,000 miles across the United States and Canada as well as some additional international destinations. She traveled via automobile with her cat covering national interpretations of home, place and impacts of the pandemic as well as personal photos and images of national environmental landscapes and social-commercial destinations.
“I got to every state, including Hawaii. I didn't get to every Canadian province because I ran out of time. So the maritime provinces will be this fall. The maritime provinces of Canada will be this fall.”
When the pandemic started, Whiting created a Facebook page and invited friends, family and Homer community members to post photos and videos of what life was like for them. Eventually, “I just decided to take it on the road and see how the rest of the nation was. Because I love to travel. I love to take photos. I love to talk to people, you know, so I love storytelling, so it combined all my passions, and I just decided to take the project on the road,” she said.
“I reached out to Tote Maritime in Anchorage. They donated round trip transport of my car, very kind. So then I drove it up to Anchorage. They transported it to Seattle. I flew to Seattle, and then that was when I spent six months all over the US, because I had the time and that money, the fact that they donated, saved a lot of money.”
Whiting provided these details about the wandering features of her project:
“The show offered a reminder of the kindness of strangers. And really, this project is a documentary art project. So people have asked me, like, what did you learn about? You know, statistics I couldn't tell you. What I can tell you is that there were some states that were more prone to being masked other states that weren't. That's based on what I saw, billboards, signs, people that I met so and I didn't have an agenda when I was out, I just wandered and went wherever I wanted to go, lots of back roads and byways, and then I would just bump into people. And people were more than happy to share their stories. So I took photographs of people, places, animals, you know, the landscape...”
She wrapped up the basic intention of her show with these remarks: “It's really very, very much purposely about everyday people. They're not rich and famous. They're, you know, it's just people that you would meet on the street, on a hiking trail, in a gas station, it was just intended to be you and me, and it's really about the power of storytelling, and also, like just listening to people's stories, we all have a story to share.”
Additional First Friday show openings will be held at the Bunnell Street Arts Center, the Art Shop Gallery, Homer Council on the Arts, the Grace Ridge Brewery, the Pratt Museum, Ptarmigan Arts, South Peninsula Hospital and the Dean Gallery.
