Joseph Clayton Mills - Description

In Voice Crossing, archival films of holiday parades, marching bands, square dances, and family celebrations from throughout the Bay Area are projected through an array of rotating mirrors, creating a kaleidoscope of overlapping images. From the walls of the exhibition space comes the faint murmur of dozens of oral history recordings—personal stories of immigration and internment camps, migrant workers and lawyers, the birth of Silicon Valley, the gay rights movement, the music and art scenes of the Bay area, and more. The images shift, dance, and blur; the voices obscure one another and fade into white noise. Together, sound and image evoke the complex ways in which memory and history dissolve into one another, as the life of a community emerges from the individual lives of those who have come before. Voice Crossing invites its audience to reflect on their own continuity with that past, to contemplate the relationship between the personal and the communal, and to interrogate the shared stories, rituals, and memories that bring them together.