A number of the drawings in the notebook are sketches of dresses. I've been keeping those aside, waiting for some idea of what I might write about the set - I had the sense that they belonged together. Today, when I sat down at my computer, it occurred to me that all week long, I had been seeing the subject to pair with these dresses.
Right now on the UofA campus, there's an an exhibit up called the REDress Project - all around campus, red dresses hang, empty, on hangers. They are a haunting representation of the many missing aboriginal women in Canada. It's the red colour that's the most striking - not the colour of mourning, but the colour of blood. Against the white and grey of Edmonton in March, you can't help but take notice.
Like these sketches, each red dress hanging from the trees and hallways is unique. Like each woman that the dresses represent. I like to picture the type of person who would have picked out each dress, and what occasion they might have been saving it for. In my mind, there are two women for every dress - the woman who owned the dress first (the installation is made up of donated dresses), and the woman who will never see the dress at all, but whose memory lingers somewhere in the scarlet folds.
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