Saturday was a first for me.
Polaroids I took at the @marchforpalestine.seattle in May 2024 ended up in a pop-up exhibit at @pipsqueak.seattle by way of Instagram, @circadies’ kind invitation, and @elderandyarrow’s artful arrangement, as part of an ongoing project to archive that historic community action.
I’d been on the periphery in the lead-up to this preview of a larger exhibit planned for Spring and could barely visualize how it would all come together. “I can’t believe this is real,” is all I could muster up when I walked in.
The piece itself, which I called “Assemblage for Gaza” when Yarrow asked me for a title, struck me as symbolic of the process itself. Disparate people coming together with a shared vision and only the vaguest of plans co-creating something beautiful; that image applies to the march, to the exhibit, and to the framed work too.
I also gave it a subtitle. “Metamerism” is a concept from color theory that names when two objects look the same under one light, but different in another. It felt like the best way to express the other dichotomy I was feeling: the uneasy mix of joy and grief when thinking about how the whole world mobilized for Gaza with very little to show for it but memories. That’s what the expired polaroids try to capture: that unrepresentable loss that must remain part of the picture.
This exhibit isn’t a museum. It’s a living memory. At the end of this process, the elements of collage and photography in solidarity within this silver frame will part ways, just as every crowd must eventually disperse. And yet, in their moment of unity, they insist that we are part of a whole. We are part of the same world as Gaza. Love and loss, joy and grief, life and death are snapshots of a shared story.
Saturday was my first time at @pipsqueak.seattle, though I’d heard the name come up in conversation many times before. I took a lot of photos of the space itself.
More scenes from Saturday’s set-up, before the community started showing up.