Picking Up the Pieces: Upcoming Understudy Exhibition a Collaboration Between Local Artist and Formerly Homeless Adults

When artist Emma Balder set up two thirteen-foot blank canvases for residents of the St. Francis Center, had them paint them in bright colors, and then asked them to rip up the paintings and rearrange the pieces, Darrin Johnson saw a metaphor for life.

"Cutting it up like your life was falling apart. You can pick your life up, put it back together and it might be more beautiful and colorful than before," says Johnson, who was homeless for three years before coming to St. Francis, a refuge for people transitioning out of homelessness in the Denver area. Putting the pieces back together to create something more beautiful is one message that Balder and St. Francis residents hope people get out of their art exhibition, Heard to be Seen, Seen to be Heard, opening March 27 at Understudy.
During three collaborative sessions with Balder in September, eighteen residents gathered for regenerative art sessions and group dialogue. In the first session, residents talked about some of the challenges they've faced and overcome, as well as challenges they were still facing, including mental and physical health issues, addiction, trying to find a job, trying to get insurance, being around other people and being alone. Residents wrote about these issues on challenge cards and then channeled the challenges into the canvases through abstract expressionism.

During the second session, residents did blind contour drawings as a warm-up. "It's basically when you draw something, but you look at what you're drawing and not the drawing," Balder explains. Johnson saw a deeper meaning in this exercise as well. "That actually was my favorite part," he recalls. "We went on the deck and one of the exercises was to pick an object. I picked the cash register building and was getting ready to start drawing it. She told us, 'Look at it, close your eyes, now draw it.' When you close your eyes, it's all together. When you open it up, your life's in chaos."

After the blind contour exercise, the residents channeled more emotions by drawing on the canvas and then giving shape to those emotions with paint. "There would be these built-up layers of paint, going over and over again in the same spot," Balder says. "That, to me, reads as a reflection of some of the frustration of dealing with the multiple layers of issues."

During the final session, the group came up with one way to overcome each challenge and wrote those down on the challenge cards. Then they cut up the paintings, rearranged the pieces, reconstructed them around a wire sculpture and glued the pieces together. Balder later took the pieces back to her studio and sewed them together.

The resulting boulder-like structure is the focal point of Heard to be Seen, Seen to be Heard, but there will also be a video showing what happened during the sessions. Some of the challenge cards and drawings will also be on display, and the drawings will be for sale, with proceeds going directly back to the residents. And thanks to the support of an Arts in Society grant administered through RedLine Contemporary Art Center, participating residents were also compensated $20 an hour for their work.

Understudy is the perfect place for the exhibition because artists themselves tend to feel like understudies, Balder says."There's a main role that we're not quite getting," she notes. "That, and I know a few artists who have been homeless or are on the edge of being homeless, and I think there's some overlap in feelings there."

Balder was looking for ways to bring artists and non-artists together through healing art. "Art has always been a way for me to understand myself and the world around me," Balder says, adding that as someone with auditory sensitivities, art often serves as her way of processing the sounds of the world. "It has also helped me in coping with my own ongoing physical health issues, anxiety, learning how to have a better relationship with myself."
At the time of the project's conception, she was also doing a lot of hiking, sketching boulders and making small boulder sculptures in her own style, which is at the intersection of painting and textiles. "I'm using my painting like fabric and fibers like paint," she says, "so basically what that looks like is I'm manipulating these small bits of textiles and fiber paintings, which are more detailed works, and creating abstract paintings, cutting them up and rearranging the pieces and sewing them together in new configurations."

As she studied boulders and created her own, she started thinking a lot about the boulder as both a barrier and a shelter. "And how can we find a way to find comfort and peace and shelter in our barriers?" Balder muses. "That kind of opened my mind to a lot of ideas, just thinking about the things that I was going through, thinking about some of the things the residents were going through. So that sparked this idea of creating this project around some of the barriers that the residents were facing."

For Johnson, the hardest part of the project was getting past the awkwardness of dealing with his emotions in front of other people, but the release was worth it. "In order for this whole thing to come together truthfully, we had to be truthful on those cards," he says. "To release something, you have to be truthful with yourself. I let myself open in a different way. I'm not a sad person, but I let my emotions do what we did." The emotional release was palpable in the room during the dialogue sessions, he adds.
While some residents were hesitant about the project at first, Reid Shaylor was all for it. "I use art as a release because of all the BS I've gone through all my life and because of my sexuality," says Shaylor, who was homeless in St. Louis before becoming a resident at the St. Patrick Center there and finally transferring to St. Francis. "When they approached me, I said, 'Oh, this would be perfect.'...A lot of us, when we get a certain age, we feel like our relatives just leave us. They don't care about us. But they inspired and got people to work together as a community and not be separate, alone in their apartments. That inspired me to be happy."

Through the collective creation and dialogue sessions, the project aimed to address the emotional, physical and financial barriers people face transitioning out of homelessness and to help them foster a sense of belonging within society. "Projects like Heard to be Seen, Seen to be Heard use abstract art to empower residents, allowing them to express their stories and reconnect with their inherent self-worth," adds St. Francis Center CEO Nancy Burke. "These initiatives not only provide stability and security but also inspire hope and transformation."

Balder adds that art can be a bridge between stigmatized communities and society. "That's really what the title of the show and this project is about," she says. "I think it's really important to hear some of these stories, to know them and to know their names so that they can feel seen and valued in society. In order for them to be seen and feel part of society, we have to hear them. In order for them to feel heard, we have to see them as human beings."
Shaylor hopes that people who see the exhibition will recognize the humanity of the St. Francis residents in the art. "The piece says, 'Hello. How are you? We're not dead. We're not down there on the scum of the earth. While all of y'all are out there having a good time, remember we were once there, too,'" Shaylor says, adding that just because someone hit rock bottom doesn't mean they're not a human being anymore. "Through art, we can express what little we have left to say, 'We're not dead yet.'"

While the final product is large and abstract, it is heavy with a range of emotions. And all of the details are still there if you look closely — a butterfly, a house, a face. "Someone saw art in a banana on a wall," Shaylor concludes. "So when people see this, I hope they see more depth into the human soul, the human characteristics. We have a lot more to show and a lot more to give."

Heard to be Seen, Seen to be Heard opens March 27 and runs through April 27 at Understudy, 14th and Stout streets. A few residents, including Johnson and Shaylor, will speak at the opening reception at 5:30 p.m. March 27; learn more on Balder's website.