CommoN is a photo and video project that interrogates the cultural weight of language embedded in everyday speech. The project focuses on words and expressions that circulate casually and repeatedly, functioning as linguistic commons while carrying layered, unstable, and often contested meanings.

These words are fabricated as steel objects and activated through fire. Combustion operates as both method and metaphor, situating language within processes of transformation, erasure, and exposure. The act of burning destabilizes the authority of text, revealing how meaning is not fixed but contingent upon context, duration, and material conditions.

Each work is staged in a site-specific environment chosen for its social, historical, or symbolic resonance. The surrounding landscape becomes an interpretive framework, amplifying tensions between permanence and impermanence, visibility and disappearance. Fire introduces temporality and risk, allowing language to exist momentarily before collapse, echoing the fragility of shared meanings within public discourse.

CommoN is a collaborative practice by photographer Salem Krieger and sculptor/illustrator Richard Newton. Their long-standing collaboration and sustained dialogue around art, language, and contemporary culture inform an interdisciplinary approach that merges performative action, object-making, and photographic documentation.