Above: A ’56 Chevy belonging to The Skulsky Family (Caitlind Brown’s maternal family)
Please note, we are officially finished collecting car stories for this project. We are leaving this webpage online as an archive of our process.
Being inside a car usually means you are between places, located in transit between origin and destination, Point A and Point B. People often think of cars as “non-places,” as pragmatic mechanisms for mobility. While this is true, they are also microworlds, insulated by plastic, metal, and fiberglass. Cars are sites for conversations + arguments, contemplation + boredom, encounters + collisions, cross-country adventures + mundane day-to-day commutes. In places like Alberta (where Winter seems eternal) cars privilege passengers with warmth and comfort. In summer months, windows down and tunes up, cruising in a car embodies some persistent remnant of the [North] American Dream.
It’s difficult to generalize the impacts of Car Culture on our cities, our environment, our economies, our mortality, and our lifestyles. Quite simply, the popularity of the automobile has changed everything.
A collection of auto-nostalgia + turning points for CARBON COPY
Our upcoming public sculpture CARBON COPY is designed to explore the intersection between mass-produced + individual, using a glitched 1988 Plymouth Caravelle as a symbol of the imperfect replication of similar experiences. In an effort to capture a weird cross-section of car-based moments, anyone who has ever been a driver or passenger is invited to participate in The Glove Box below.
If you fill out the questions above, your answers will be handwritten by the artists on carbon copy paper. The original copy will be placed in the glove compartment of CARBON COPY (our car sculpture in the Brewery District in Edmonton), becoming an invisible time capsule of the overlap between microworlds. The carbon copy will be scanned and shared (anonymously) on this blog. We reserve the freedom to shorten entries when necessary for space.
CARBON COPY 