The current exhibition at Burlington City Arts (BCA) addresses that universal human emotion — grieving, after experiencing loss of the irreplaceable love that centered one’s life. The day I viewed the show, I was still processing the loss of a very dear friend who had died the previous day and with whom I often discussed the general community malaise that has so filtered down to every aspect of our lives.
Both of us lived long enough to have felt the devastation of political upheaval abroad and in the US, so that sense of sorrow was nothing new. Both of us also have experienced personal tragedies — the loss of a parent, a partner, an adult child’s choices gone awry, cultural discrimination and as what comes with age — the diminishing horizon of our dreams.
The eight artists in the show open up this very personal space that houses pain and longing. Instead of feeling vulnerable and fragile with what I brought to the show, I found solace in community. I subsequently learned that the curator, Heather Farrell, who had planned this show two years earlier, experienced her own personal loss when her husband died a few months before the show opened.
Throughout the gallery, by invitation of the BCA, therapists and psychologists from the Vermont Association for Psychoanalytic Studies provide perspective statements and notes to contextualize to the viewer how such losses are processed in the mind and heart.