Building community one face at a time

In a town the size of Creemore, it’s impossible to walk down the street without recognizing many of the faces you encounter. It’s also impossible, in conversations about what’s going on around town, to not hear the same names over and over again.

What’s sometimes harder to do, however, is to attach all of the faces you know to all of the names you know.

That’s the inspiration behind Creemore photographer and artist MK Lynde’s latest project, which will have its home base in René Petitjean’s studio at 195 Mill Street during the Creemore Festival of the Arts.

Lynde is hoping that each and every one of you – and ideally, everyone in town – will drop by to see her and pose for a simple photograph, holding a sign which says your name. In the long term, Lynde envisions a sort of Creemore database, perhaps at the library or perhaps at the Creemore Echo, where people can drop in and search for a name or scroll through faces to find one they are curious about.

“Creemore is the perfect size for this,” says Lynde. “We’re all part of this community, and we’re small enough that we can all know each other.”

To further illustrate the fact that we’re all in this together, Lynde will be feeding all of the photographs she takes into a piece of software she’s fond of, known as the Mosaic Generator. Capable of creating large-scale photographs using thousands of smaller photographs as its pixels, the software played a large part in Lynde’s last Creemore show, which saw her using seductive Facebook profile pictures to create large-scale iconic photos of pin-up girls.

This time, she has a tamer goal in mind – to use photographs of Creemore residents to create larger representations of the village we all love. Visitors to the studio will be able to watch the Mosaic Generator do its work in real time, which should make for an interesting and literal illustration of community building.