On Sunday, Oct. 27, a group exhibition was installed at START Gallery in Sackville,
New Brunswick. The show, Everything Remains, was a collaboration between Fine Arts students (and roommates): Ella MacKay, Teagan Stewart, and Ella Webber. As the acting START Gallery Coordinator, I was lucky to gain insight into the show and the artists themselves.
That evening, the group held their opening reception, inviting the public in to celebrate
the new exhibition and experience shared community. Just earlier that day, the trio and I were
installing the letters, row by row, column by column, note by note, drawing by drawing,
adjusting the lights, choosing the music, arranging the table and desk and chair, rolling out the
carpet, laying out papers, and sharpening pencils. You would have never known that the
exhibition was finished just minutes before the first guests arrived. The three main walls displayed 100 envelopes in clean rows of three, each filled with a single drawing, photo, letter, or poem. Words unspoken now lined the walls – half obscured by the brown envelopes – offering silent hopes and grievances alike, urging visitors to untuck the notes from their beds and brave a peek into the personal. The fourth wall, unassuming and close to the entrance, was adorned with another eight-by-five grid of envelopes, empty but not unwelcoming. This wall was for visitors. In the centre of the room sat a low coffee table – white and chipped – which held cups of soft blue and green pencils and a collection of loose papers (some were photos and print, and others were totally blank). A second writing desk was stationed to the left of the wall of empty envelopes, also filled with blank pages and blue pencils. Both setups provided the chance for visitors to add their own experiences, their own words, to the exhibition. Frustrations and wishes, poetic anger and unwelcome love was poured into more than 50 additional pieces and slipped into the collection by anonymous dreamers. It was an emotional exhibition, especially during the opening reception.
The trio’s statement reveals: “Everything Remains explores our own encounters with regret, missed connections, and things left unsaid. Is it worth holding back the truth to spare each other from the hurt? […] The combination of installation, letters, poetry, and drawings documents a shared attempt to reach across time and distance – both literal and metaphorical – to create our own closure. This collection is a lesson in the permanence of our interactions; a practice in noticing the things that haunt us, where our retroactive and misplaced vulnerability instills the importance of acting before it’s too late.”
This rings true and honest, and exceedingly mournful. As visitors face the walls, the sheer number of letters is unavoidable and demanding. However disconnected the letters themselves may be, there is an atmosphere of grief and rage within the work, boiling just below the surface, pitiful and grasping. It was sobering to be among the letters, among the gentle blue pencils and clear black inks. While I knew the collection belonged to the three original writers, the words seemed also to belong to me, to strangers, to no one. False identities were created for the letters, narratives to be found, patterns isolated and followed. These people were not real – the names certainly weren’t – but the words and stories and feelings were. Several letters described the sender’s lover, lost to another, to time, or to distance, and how the writer – whether their name be Bee or Marcus or Louise or Captain – longed to see their former companion again. Other letters found themselves to be washed in tears, lashing out through their regret, and solemnly admitting their defeat. Others still questioned the honesty in a relationship, wishing for those shiny December days to return and promising to carry them from the park, weak in arms and heart. Drawings of hands outstretched, faces unknown, and whispers unheard accompanied the letters, reaffirming the emotional toll within and haunting the memories we didn’t know we had.
I also found myself watching fellow visitors move slowly among the letters, picking each one carefully, some skipping a row, others examining every individual piece in silence. Time drifted and disappeared, stretched and loomed. Two hours became twenty minutes, two seconds became twenty words. Heads leaned on shoulders, hands gripped other hands, hushed voices mumbled and giggled and smiled, and the muttered shuffling of feet held the room as visitors hungrily searched the walls for meaning. Guests kneeled at the low table, scratching out their worries, woes, and wishes, while others hovered above, vulture-like, to take a glimpse at the new chronicles and devour their words, their wretchedness, their wants, their worlds. A small group stood huddled by the visitor collection, waiting for letters to be posted before swooping in to snatch up the fresh story. Like a scandal paper, the anonymous wall became an event, secrets becoming spectacle.
I added my own letter to the wall during a brief lull in attendance. A rough sketch of a fallen blue bike, with a letter on the back of the page. I addressed it to no one, even though it most certainly was. It was to an old friend, a dead friend, a stranger. Not that he could ever read my words aloud in any meaningful way, but I wrote about my frustrations toward him, my hopes, my disappointment, my love. The bike paid homage to him too, given his avid outdoorsy personality and affinity for cycling. The icon lies in blue grass, riderless, expectant yet desolate. I didn’t cry at the table; I’d done that before, just over a year ago, but I knew it wasn’t an impossibility later. I stashed my misery in the top row, third from the left, neatly behind someone’s letter to an ex. I don’t wonder if anyone recognized my handwriting or drawing. The words were out now.
Everything Remains provided an outlet for things to be said, subjects to be breached, and boundaries to be tested, however unsavoury they may have been, without the direct consequences of confrontation. Stories can be shared, names altered, and words adjusted. The feelings never change but the response does. Here, emotions are condensed into a room of silence and shared among strangers. Anonymous yet familiar, Everything Remains ties storytelling and experience to the gallery, allowing visitors to envelop themselves in the envelopes and hide themselves in the words of another. There is solace to be found in someone else’s unanswered prayers and catharsis in scraping away a name. Identities are exchanged, experiences re-felt and realized, histories and hearts exposed.
I left Everything Remains with a distinct feeling of satisfying loss. Loss for the show as
we packed it away, loss for the visitors who never came, and loss for those who did. Loss in the
letters and the words unsaid, in the feelings unearthed from within and feelings yet to be felt. But it was comforting and exciting to know the success of the exhibition and the plans for the group down the road, of the words now revealed, and the shared experience of the series. Ella Mackay, Teagan Stewart, and Ella Webber spent two months creating their show, writing and drawing daily, compiling their thoughts and feelings, creating new faces while remaining true to themselves. It all came to a head that Saturday, and now it’s packed away again two-and-a-half weeks later, and yet we know it’s not ever going back to the way it was again. Feelings can’t be unfelt. Words said cannot be unsaid. Even the walls bear scars from the show as chunks of plaster were dug out while we excavated nails, spackle was shoved into the cracks, and paint was smeared over the empty patches. It was bare and blank and strange and foreign, and we stood at the centre of that alien room with a table of tools, loose nails, and paper at our side. I took a quick video of the white walls for the gallery’s social media, and that felt almost disrespectful, blasphemous even. Like desecrating a grave that was never there. However, like the words and memories and stories, we move on. Tears have been shared, hands held, words exchanged, feelings drawn out. Changed, yes, but still moving. And we say thank you and see you later, and we walk under a cold sun with arms full of letters and tongues full of words we’d still like to say, and then it’s goodnight and goodbye until the next morning for work.