What’s that one thing you’ve always wanted to tell someone?

 

This is the question I asked on posters I placed around Kenyon’s campus, Knox county, New York, Arkansas, Minnesota, and Utah. Each poster had tabs with phone numbers on it, leading people to a voicemail with a robotic voice asking them to “speak into the void.” The first phone in the installation represents the source of the messages I used, the confessional hotline.

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Confessions are less about telling another person something and more about admitting that thing to yourself. I always feel the urge to get things off my chest, get them out in the open. But there are things I push down because I don’t want to admit them. Anger, resentment, romantic feelings… 

 

Tying together the culture of repression and shame, this installation both overwhelms the participant with sensory information and warms them with the realization that most people have the same pressing thoughts and feelings. I feel ashamed for feelings of anger, and replace that anger with resentment. Many others I know are ashamed of emotions like fear and sadness, they hold it in, replace it with anger. We are raised to learn repression, learn to repress because it’s not polite, ladylike, manly, appropriate, comfortable. We have all learned shame — pushing things down is not innate. I decided to present these themes as an installation because of my personal background in theater and set design. There is a theatricality to our privacies which intrigues me.

 

My installation encompasses a series of small rotary telephone sculptures, each containing a voicemail or series of voicemails, collected anonymously and edited for discretion. The phones engage multiple senses, as the viewer picks up each phone and listens to it. I made the phones with different media, but they’re all painted an impartial white, obscuring the object’s information and contents. The medium of each phone informs the contents of the messages on it — chewed gum representing the sickly sweetness of a crush, paper for the fragility of insecurity and self-held concepts of our ability to be loved, bubble wrap for the quiet volatility of resentment and anger, and wax for the uncomfortable and malleable confrontation of identity. The voicemail I recorded says “If you’d like to speak into the void,” giving the caller a sense of whispering into the abyss, confessing and disclosing that which they’ve been holding in. The robotic tone of the voicemail with the mysterious posters gives the project an uncanny tone  — it’s scary to confess things, to confront them. The installation itself is eerie, with translucent partitions separating each phone and a variety of ambient sounds like whispers and static. I’ve taken inspiration from Ann Hamilton’s Ghost: A Border Act, an installation with suspended organza cubes and projection, meditating on the idea of delineation. Do Ho Suh, similarly, uses colorful translucent fabric to establish the concept of place and home. I also play with opacity, creating an environment with a sense of both privacy and voyeurism.

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Listening in on a confession from the other end of the line feels shameful, like something you shouldn’t know, but in fact it’s comforting to know we all think the same things. Specifically, having this installation at Kenyon College unearths the underbelly of gossip. Kenyon is a small school, there’s a sort of “whisper network”. Repression and gossip go hand and hand — we talk about other people’s lives to distract from our own. We choose not to confront them, or ourselves, in these dealings. We all have a morbid curiosity for this information, which has inspired the use of rotary phones. They have a vintage softness, while the unconventional materials I use create an unsettling and creepy ambiance. 

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Even though the message tells you to talk into the void, your confession is still being turned into a project, displayed and shared. It seems counterintuitive, but the idea is that whatever you’re holding in will come out in some way, shape or form. It may be through passive aggression, self destruction, or anger, but it will come out. Many of the things we don’t share are just intrusive thoughts. You pick up the phone and it’s all you hear, these little thoughts that follow us around, that we’re told we shouldn’t have. But they’re just thoughts. 

We all struggle to find ourselves, feel insecure, nurse silly crushes or absurd grudges. It’s important to acknowledge the universality of these thoughts in voicing them individually. It’s important to leave the message.