WHAT REMAINS...

A classroom is one of the most highly charged atmospheres where enormous amounts of energy and emotion are expended in a contained space.

This installation explores the transfiguration of this energy into the desks, chairs and blackboard of a second grade classroom. The imprint of this energy creates a narrative of the essence of the children who used them. Joy, angst, confusion, pressure and defeat are made visible in the school desks and chairs. Broken, slumped, squashed – they are affected by the transference of accumulated emotion/energy which has distorted the shapes of these inanimate objects.  They make visible the effects in ways that never physically show in the body but reside there nonetheless.

The color has been drained from this scene – everything is white – to make the viewer feel like they have stumbled on the bones of something. It is a memory preserved and still energized.

In the front of the room three fluorescent lights stream a cold white light further bleaching out the white desks. The light provides a constant, insistent energy. There’s no ambient quality to it. It’s a light for working, examining, flooding the scene so all is revealed. Emitting from the ‘blackboard’, it represents knowledge and harsh reality.

Books and pencils encrusted with white sand and marble dust lay on or in each desk. They represent the passage of time, preservation, healing and  impenetrable knowledge. 

Around the perimeter of the room are ethereal images created from marble dust adhered to translucent vellum. The prints are a textured white shadow that appears to change from a positive to negative of the image as the viewer moves around the room.

At its core, this piece is about retrieving a moment in time and examining the evidence around an event that changed the fabric of who I was at the time.

At this moment in Sr. Mary Oliver’s second grade class, I was humiliated for not coming up with the precise answer the nun expected. Standing at my desk while others sat, I made an unconscious decision that it was more beneficial to disappear than it was to stand out – to seek out what I was supposed to think rather than think myself – a crushing decision for a young artist. In creating this piece I am reclaiming that act, honoring it and reversing it.

The timing of this piece was eerie. The opening was two weeks after the exposure of the priests of the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse of children in Boston. This unrelated all consuming story spilled into the gallery heightening the artwork’s impact for viewers. It magnified the inability of children to remove themselves from harm. Whether it is a vindictive teacher, classmate bullies, or unwanted attention from overly friendly priests, there is no escaping the second grade.

Julie Levesque