While You Wait

04/14/2019

A thank you to Robin Hoffman for documenting my day wrapped around a tree on the downtown mall in the rain. One of my favorite "installations" inside the box. Blast from 2014.

Host Robin Hoffman talks with Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville.

11/14/2014

Today from 9 am to 6 pm I will be inside the toasty warm lobby of the Paramount with a special edition of While You Wait. It's a collaboration with filmmaker Yael Melamede who will be speaking at TEDx this afternoon. Her film, The (Dis)Honesty Project, seeks to uncover the societal/institutional structures of dishonesty. I will be facilitating the video recording of your lies inside the box. Got a lie, big or small, that you need to get off your chest? Come see me.

10/02/2014

Dang there's so much good stuff going on all around town tomorrow night! Maybe you will want to dial down the stimulus for a few minutes? While You Wait will be lurking outside of McGuffey tomorrow evening 5-8 pm. Stop by the box if you want to commune with yourself, the sky, SOMETHING ELSE that I can't tell you. And maybe you'll glimpse my ever-expanding intern Ms. Evelyn May.

Evelyn, my intern who (no offense) keeps getting larger.

09/29/2014

If you're more of a tweeter, you can follow us in twitspace.

09/26/2014

A few announcements having to do with While You Wait:

1) Today is the last day of my "residency" at Best Buy. (I've decided to call anything a residency that involves me staying put for twenty minutes.) If you can make time in your day to come experience it in this strange environment you will receive it back many fold. Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

2) If you can't, just know I will be camped outside McGuffey next Friday as part of First Fridays. Then I'll be slowing down my outings to once a month for a bit to accommodate other projects.

3) On Nov. 14th I'll be collaborating with Yael Melamede, an Academy award winning documentary filmmaker, as part of her upcoming film and the TEDx conference outside of the Jefferson Theater. Details coming soon.

4) While You Wait will be part of the LET THERE BE LIGHT luminous pageant at PVCC on Friday, Dec. 12th, from 6-9 pm. This is always a magical event. Mark your calendars!

5) If you have connections to some place that would be perfect for While You Wait (decent foot traffic & diversity of population), let me know! The DMV and Wal-Mart are targets of mine. The butcher at Kroger, for example, was so enthused he's trying to install me in the Barracks Road Kroger. I promise no live butchering in the box.

09/12/2014

While You Wait, you fly through the air with the greatest of ease!

09/12/2014

Taking lunch 3-3:30.

09/08/2014

I've been taught that when studying a piece of time-based art, it's good to consider the first image, the last image, and something in the middle to build an armature of meaning. Even though While You Wait has an indeterminate structure and isn't necessarily even art, I thought I'd try to look at Friday's inaugural stint at Best Buy through that lens:

FIRST IMAGES: a messy stack of plywood panels, tools, costume pieces, instruments, on the floor by the shopping carts and palpable frenetic energy as my helper and I try to assemble, fix, and rig 5 gold curtains inside the While You Wait box in less than an hour. I can't find certain tools and I'm sweating, cursing, and lightly panicking. Why am I doing this, I wonder? It's so hard and I haven't even really begun. The encircling chorus of TVs are flashing images of ethnically diverse families smiling about all the great Labor Day deals that are part of the Labor Day Sale that is STILL GOING ON BLESS US ALL.

MIDDLE IMAGES: Around midday, a man I know emerges from the box and says he traveled to three different places in his mind in his 5 minutes: his grandmother's beach club in Old Lime, CT, to Casablanca where he was "salaciously anticipating" dancing girls emerging from the gold curtains, and finally to "that place where I go in yoga." I jot down his account quickly because my iphone is dying and I have to go buy a phone charger 20 feet away. I note that I no longer feel there is any world beyond the walls of Best Buy.

FINAL IMAGES: Ahmed, the last visitor of the day and one of the front-of-house Best Buy greeter employees, comes out of the box and tells me the middle eastern music that Chip has been playing inside reminded him of his homeland of Palestine, from which his entire extended family is displaced. He tells me his family went to Iraq where his mother was shot, then they went to a refugee camp in Syria where Angelina Jolie in her UN capacity visited and promised to help them. Four years ago, he and his family arrived in Charlottesville. He asks me if I would like to see him do his traditional dancing at UVA next year. We take a selfie and trade emails, and I limp out through the automatic double doors, weary and in pain from standing all day in ridiculous shoes but full of heart from all the new connections and the shattering of expectations.