This Unfathomable Weight is a three-part lightbox and billboard project that grapples publicly with how we make sense of living through the massive crises of recent years. As we return “back to normal,” the effects of collective trauma, inflicted by the pandemic and cascade of socio-political upheavals will linger across society for a long time. How can we heal from widespread experiences of shock, anxiety, loss, and social upheaval?                                   

Through an understanding of trauma as a psychic rupture, where meaning-making has been suspended, deferred, or displaced, the project carves out space for reparative gestures of making sense across personal, societal, and spiritual registers. In part one (Fall 2022), Jessica Thalmann reflects on a personal crisis of meaning through a series of images that document her time in the ICU as primary caregiver to her mother who suddenly became critically ill. In part two (Winter 2023), Christina Battle uses text-based imagery to attend to collective resilience against an overwhelming media ecology. In part three (Summer 2023), Erika DeFreitas looks to the miraculous as a way of contending with uncertainty through a daily ritual of attempting to capture the Virgin Mary (or what she refers to as the “divine feminine”) in photographs of the sun.

When the world took a strange turn in 2020, I felt completely unmoored as I grappled with personal crises, the pandemic, and the unrelenting succession of catastrophes and sociopolitical upheavals. I couldn’t engage with much beyond doom-scrolling—looking for answers in statistics and headlines. It’s easier to turn off and defer when feeling powerless in the wake of events that make no sense. Not much offered me any sense of solace during that time except the works of Jessica Thalmann, Christina Battle, and Erika DeFreitas. I came to invite them to participate in the project because I recognized in their recent art, writing, or social media feeds something that spoke to me on an emotional level, something that signaled that they were working through similar experiences or anxieties as myself. I began this project with a selfish, therapeutic impulse, and then found comfort and commiseration among this group of artists.

Curating this project has become an antidote to my own post-traumatic inertia and anxiety. The effects of trauma are often characterized by sustained disaffection, apathy, and persistent low-level state of shock. By meditating on Thalmann, Battle, and DeFreitas’ images of fragility, grief, quiet rage, and serene contemplation, this project provided a way to truly consider and dwell in the complexity of emotions I felt at the time—to try to fathom the magnitude of this moment. There’s poetry in the double meaning of the word fathom; in verb form it means to understand something deeply, and as a noun it is a nautical measure of the depth of water roughly equivalent to six feet. The measure comes from the Old English fæthm, meaning "outstretched arms," describing the distance from fingertip to fingertip when one’s arms stretch from the sides of the body.11Merriam-Webster online dictionary, s.v. “fathom,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fathom.This Unfathomable Weight embraces the need to understand and give form to what overwhelms.

This project is an attempt to consider not just the pandemic, but any event that traumatises a large number of people within a shared timespan causing a crisis of meaning. The events of the past few years simply stand in recent cultural memory as an exemplar of this kind of shared experience. Intended as a series of public gestures, this exhibition invites a wider audience to collectively process together.

 —Farah Yusuf

Each part of This Unfathomable Weight features a fifth image on a public billboard in Mississauga for the first month of the exhibition.

Movement One: Interior
September 5–October 2, 2022
Public billboard on Eglinton Avenue West, west of intersection with Mavis Road, on the south side facing west.

Movement Two: Ecology
January 9–February 5, 2023
Lakeshore Road East, east of intersection with Lakefront Promenade, on the south side facing west.

Movement Three
May 1–28, 2023
Derry Road East, west of intersection with Professional Court, on the north side facing west.