Studio & wants your pandemic postcards

Gallery putting together Letters to Isolation project

By Katie Chicklinski-Cahill Staff reporter

Thursday, Feb 11, 2021 3:12 PM

Gallery putting together Letters to Isolation project

Raise your hand if you’re over the COVID-19 pandemic.

We’ve been in the pandemic for almost a year and people are struggling. Maybe more than you know.

Sometimes, being able to speak to that struggle can be difficult, if not impossible for a lot of people. So, the artists over at Studio & want to give people a voice, a way of expressing how they’re feeling in the face of ... all of this.

“I think that there are a lot of people out there that don’t feel they have a place to express their feelings, what they’re going through,’ said Studio & member artist Elizabeth Kinahan. “And I think that also, since everybody is struggling in one way or another, and maybe it’s not an obvious struggle like you’ve lost your job, maybe it’s a less-obvious struggle like they’re really battling depression or loneliness, I think that they feel like their problems aren’t any worse than anybody’s else’s problems right now. No one can say, ‘Hey, I’m alone in this.’ But they are and they aren’t, right? We’re all going through something, and this hasn’t been easy for anybody. But at the same time, your problems are still yours, and you are battling with hem every day and you might not feel like you have a place to – or a right – to air those, the discomforts or the internal struggles or just the battle of finding motivation when the future’s so uncertain.”

Kinahan said the window installation will work as a two-way street between the people sharing their feelings and the passersby experiencing the cards.

“I wanted to give people a chance to say what they’ve been experiencing, grappling with, what’s been hardest, just any aspect of it, but without the pressure of telling somebody that they know or putting it out on social media with their name attached, or anything like that but just a way for not only people to express, but also then for other people to kind of empathize,” she said. “And so that’s the part of filling our front window with all of these words and images that people submit, then there’s other people who can walk by at any time, day or night, and spend some time relating.”

Your assignment is pretty straightforward: On a postcard, express what you’re feeling. It can be done any way you want – a poem, a drawing, anything. Then send it to Studio &, where it will be put in the gallery’s front window on Main Avenue for all to see and relate to. The gallery will add to the collection as postcards are sent in. Participants are invited to sign their name to their postcards – or not.

The gallery asks that participants get their cards in by about mid-March.

“2020 was a historic year for many reasons, but each of us has come face to face with ourselves in ways different than we ever expected. Many of us were completely isolated from friends and family. Many of us with jobs deemed essential couldn’t be, but may have wished we were. And many hung somewhere in between. Regardless, we all watched our worlds change overnight, and we moved through the new terrain for better or worse,” Kinahan said in a news release. “We invite you to capture your experience in words or pictures, on a postcard, and send it to us. As this pandemic drags on, and we approach the year mark, we ask you to show us where you’ve been. Where have you gone? What did you do? How are you? Send us a postcard.”

And postcard senders are not limited to those who live in La Plata County, Kinahan said, adding that she hopes people will spread the word about the project.

“This is open to anybody all across the world,” she said. “We don’t care where these postcards are coming from – send us, tell us what it’s like in Germany – I don’t know. How are you guys doing over there? We want to hear from everybody, and it can be just a picture, it can be just a drawing, it can be a poem, it can be a quote, whatever you want to say, and it doesn’t have to have a name or a return address attached.”

So, how are you doing?

katie@durangoherald.com