I moved to Gainesville in 2014 to attend a graduate program at the University of Florida. Like many others, I ended up staying after I'd finished. I realized after thinking of the city as somewhere I might stay longterm how little I actually knew about my chosen home.
Finding yourself a stranger in a familiar place can be particularly difficult if you're an introverted homebody, which I often tend to be. I created this project as an engine for exploration, one that would take me to places I wouldn't ordinarily go while crossing imaginary boundaries and becoming accustomed to situations outside my comfort zone.
Prairie Pickings is about Gainesville's movers and shakers, its artists and local businesses, sprawling chains and encroaching development. It's about lifetime residents and transient stopovers, the well off along with the unhoused, the empowered with the disenfranchised. Each story offers some aspect of Gainesville I — and potentially you — have never considered before. This fine-scale sense of place is juxtaposed with a bird's-eye-view of what it means to be the resident of a small city that exists in a universe so big that light from its furthest edges will never reach our eyes.
