WHAT REMAINS...

This 2nd grade classroom represents a universal moment in childhood when you realize you must stand up for yourself. 

A classroom is a highly charged atmosphere where enormous amounts of energy and emotion are expended in a contained space. Angst, joy, confusion, distraction, victory and defeat are made visible in some of the school desks and chairs of the children who used them.  

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 nine 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 my second grade class, I was humiliated for not coming up with the precise answer the teacher 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 – an unfortunate decision for a young artist. In creating this piece I am reclaiming that act, honoring it and reversing it.

What Remains… becomes more relevant with each passing year. By rekindling recollections of our own early school experiences, it opens a vital dialog between adults and children—evoking empathy for the pressures today’s students face while encouraging young visitors who encounter the artwork to express their own thoughts and stories.

There is no escaping the second grade.

Julie Levesque