ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — “What happens when our experiences are Too Big to talk about?”
That’s the introduction to an exhibition at Eastern Edge called A Hole So Big It Became The Sky, part of the larger Living Queer Histories project by St. John’s curatorial team Retro Flex.
The exhibition uses mural art, audio installation, and visitor input to communicate the experiences, both past and present, of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Curator Kailey Bryan said the concept addresses gaps in the collective memory.
“What kinds of loss exist because of the structures of queer life – a lack of intergenerational communication, and also massive loss – devastating loss – when we think about the AIDS crisis.
“We lost a generation of stories there, so there are gaps that we can never fill.”
Bryan asked Toronto-based artist Coco Guzman and St. John’s artist and trans historian Daze Jefferies to work together with the local 2SLGBTQIA+ community tell some of those stories.
Through a series of workshops, Guzman and Jefferies worked with about 30 to 40 participants who contributed to the exhibition.
Jefferies describes the creation as “a really emotional, dark but also beautiful narrative of queer life and queer archives here in Newfoundland and Labrador.”
Unlike most art exhibitions in which visitors are usually asked not to touch or photograph the work, this project encourages interaction.
The walls are covered with words, sketches, and bits of paper from archives. There’s also maps of the province and St. John’s, onto which workshop participants, and now exhibition visitors, can add their own experiences.
In that way, Jefferies called it “a changing, growing, remapping project.”
The stories told on the walls span roughly 100 years, beginning with a newspaper clipping from The Evening Telegram in 1924 in which an Anglican reverend in Trinity Bay wrote about the life commitment of two gay men who, at that point, had spent 60 years together.
“This reverend wrote a short piece calling for others to embrace love, and to think more openly about what love could represent,” said Jefferies.
And then there’s more recent histories.
“There’s all these contemporary stories that are sometimes related to everyday life, not a specific event, but that’s also what makes queer history,” explained Guzman.
These stories are evident in a pink painted image of Newfoundland, onto which experiences are written. An arrow points to an inlet: “I grew up here…came out here too”. A dot indicates another location on the island, and a line extending from the dot reads, “Nan tells me that being gay is OK”.
For Bryan, curating the community mural was an emotional experience. Their voice cracks and eyes well up explaining why:
“It’s a very special thing as a queer person to walk into a space and to see yourself reflected back… to feel that I am seen in the walls of this exhibition is for me very touching and very moving. So, I hope other people feel that, too.”
View A Hole So Big It Became The Sky at Eastern Edge (72 Harbour Dr.) until August 3.
Twitter: @juanitamercer_
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