[The New Regular] Lowercase Capital | Virtual Exhibition
Through thin walls and creaky
floors we are together, still.
In the sounds of arguments about
insurance and take-out delivery,
or the laughter over remembering;
we are hands on light
switches, keys in door locks.
We are the Winter that will
surely soon agree to Spring.
This dream. You called it “The Great Eraser”
when you woke to the play of headlights
across your bedroom ceiling. Something
missing. A hand slipping from your throat,
words elapsing; the sound of nothing outside.
February. You found the sidewalk,
Your step on ice, the sound of distant
Applause. Smoke escaping chimneys,
Revealing a path upwards, outwards.
And the East, that great eraser
of all the yesterdays, waiting.
When it was new, edges carved
by a river; by ice pushed out to the Atlantic
every Spring by a river. All eyes. And flood
waters rose. You watched, knowing July
and its feelings of forever were waiting
in the West. All eyes. At dusk the trees
filled with crows; black leaves among
the green. All eyes. Now. Not quite
Spring. You watch the 4:30 river of traffic
corner York onto Queen, and the smokers
crowd the mall entrances. River waiting
just past these darkening buildings.
Each morning, as language returns,
cohering to defeat the swim of dream logic,
back onto street signs, weather beaten
show notices, city limits; we expand
to our full height. Pull our spines upwards;
regain the fractions lost when we crumpled
in our sleep. Notice our fingertips? Reaching?
Today is this today.
Again with its weekday buses; again with
its coffee maker malfunctions; again with all
its again-nesses. But still. Today is this
today. Consider our fingertips. Reaching.
Take a moment. A breath. There is music
In the silence that waits to be filled.
The way hunger encourages. What will we
say here? An emptiness, newly rediscovered?
Or ancient foundation, mouth open to the sky,
glittering in the rain at the end point
of some long disused path? Our history has its
still blank pages. Trademarks rewritten
to resemble current beliefs. The we
that we are now. The we that hungers,
and still fears silence, barely hearing
the song we used to sing.
When we say, “That morning, that place,
used to be,” our words summon another
morning, another place. Songs that pin
our hearts. We are made of quiet, now.
We pause, hands in pockets, and watch
as memories fill empty lots. And new walls.
“Wasn’t that the deli where,” maybe?
There are shapes, shadows, like text erased
and rewritten. We share language, but not
exactly the memory of what was said, here.
When we say, “That was where we,” our words
summon ghosts, haunting new office blocks.
The pitch for this project, presented at Connexion ARC’s 2019 Art Kitchen competition, focused on a desire to present Fredericton in a manner that avoided the city’s postcard potential (City Hall, the Bill Thorpe Walking Bridge, the Barracks and its student soldiers), and concentrated instead on quotidian sublime and strange snapshots that might not traditionally appear remarkable.
Matt Carter regularly shares his photos on social media, and it is his eye for the quietly transcendent and sometimes ridiculous parts of the everyday landscape that really inspired this series. His images record and question the narratives that weave through our lives. The knocked over garbage can, the new building where an old one used to stand, graffiti, the remnants of torn flyers on electrical poles… these all open a dialogue with parts of history that are both personal and universal. They ask, “what happened here?” or “what IS happening here?” and leave plenty of room for the viewer to fill in their own stories.
Matt’s process of discovery seemed analogous to how I tend to search out inspiration for poetry, and that suggested the possibility of combining the two. The writing is not meant to fully interpret what the image is saying, nor necessarily directly relate to what the photograph presents. Instead, we hope the images and text work in dialogue with each other, finding tonal elements that intersect and lightly connect the two parts, reframing the original narrative and perhaps overlaying new ones.
The project was meant to launch during this year’s FLOURISH festival, originally scheduled for April 25th at The Maker’s Loft on Queen St. Obviously the current Covid-19 situation has made this impossible, but elements of the series were already being gradually shared via social media, primarily @lowercase_capital on Instagram.
Some have commented on the strange prescience of the pieces; images largely free of human beings accompanied by the somewhat lonely frequency of the text. While the project was conceived prior to current events, it is impossible not to overlay the tenor and dereliction of news images upon it. There isn’t any plan to turn the work into a response to the crisis, but a certain subliminal acknowledgement of it is unavoidable. For those who now find themselves with the opportunity of time and a more solitary view of their surroundings, it is a chance to discover their own Lowercase Capital, keeping all recommended safety precautions in mind, of course.
- Eric Hill
Lowercase Capital is a collaboration between Matt Carter & Eric Hill
You can follow this project @lowercase_capital on Instagram.