Link: cathy mclaurin | what haunts.
Via Dynamo
Inspired by my own family secrets, what haunts... is an interactive art installation that explores secrets and their universality. Viewers respond and participate by reading and adding, in anonymity, their own - often-intimate - secrets to the installation. The varied secrets evoke sadness, horror, shock, humor, and reassurance. They "are riveting to read, telling stories of abortion, adoption, and affairs mixed with more universal confessions, like, 'my heart is broken and I am terrified.'" -Cathy McLaurin
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The installation consists of a wall papered with secrets and a booth where participants add secrets to the project. Written in pencil on hand-cut 4"x5" newsprint rectangles, the secrets have the visual tone of a whisper, on an intimate scale. The newsprint yellows over time, evoking remnants of the past, old family letters, and nostalgia. The first 150 of the more than 2000 secrets in the project were collected by mail and exhibited in a 2002 exhibition at Artists Foundation Gallery in South Boston. The booth component was created in 2002. The spare wooden structure (6'9"x3'x3') and muslin curtain create a private and meditative space - a confessional. Participants write and then deposit their secrets into a locked box. During the time in which the project is installed, I periodically unlock the secrets and add them to an adjoining wall. Thus, participants experience the power of having written their secret and then seeing it posted alongside those of previous participants. "Viewers often spend hours reading all of the secrets posted on the walls and often come back multiple times to view the project... what haunts... demonstrates how much people have in common and how common their secrets are. It is a snap shot of what makes us human and of the human condition.".... -C.M.
