The Presumably Absent Meeting Place is a project that originated from my fascination with the artifact storage chamber at the Huron County Museum in Goderich, ON. With aid from the staff at the Museum, I was permitted to spend the year photographing and researching off-display artifacts and archival documents. By photographing these objects and documenting my reactions to the experience, I became aware that I had abandoned the objective persona I 

intended and instead had slipped into something Athinodoros Chronis calls the “ellipses.” The ellipses feature is essentially the gap that exists between the missing information surrounding an artifact, and how the viewer chooses to fill in and interpret that information to create an understanding. Once I realized this, I embraced the space of the ellipses feature and spent the year chronicling how and why I chose the artifacts that I did.

    I chose to represent my interactions with these objects by including fragments of my writing that considered how I related to each object and analyzed how I filled in its missing information based on my own lived experiences. One of the most interesting aspects of this project was my growing love of how the ordinary object can become precious. Items such as an iron, sewing machine, or medicine bottle that are seemingly common are suddenly handled just as carefully as a wedding dress when they are placed inside a museum. In fact, one morning I unwrapped a pair of old everyday shoes only to discover that I had traces of dirt from the dried mud still wedged in their soles on my hands. It was experiences like these that created tangible encounters that felt like silent conversations.

The Presumably Absent Meeting Place