Porta-Confessional | Teagan & Jacob

L'Ambiance | Friday, July 31, 12-7pm

in the parking lot beside Struts Gallery

Porta-Confessional is a participatory, ephemeral sculptural installation which takes the form of a confessional, constructed as twinned (non-functioning, replica) Porta-Potties. Within this playful, secularized confessional, Sappyfest attendees of all ages are invited into a moment of contemplative reprieve.

Ecologically constructed as a 1:1 scale facsimile from locally-sourced scrap cardboard, this installation foregrounds undisguised, sustainable materialities and invites participants to consider material lifecycles, from construction to consumption, digestion and waste.

Through extreme care and attention to detail in construction, Porta-Confessional takes inspiration from artists like Charlotte Posenenske and Chris Gilmour in elevating and respecting the status of cardboard as an accessible fine art material. Situating the ubiquitous music festival-symbol of the Porta-Potty within a secular-spiritual context endows the quotidian, possibly-unpleasant implications of using a public toilet with a disjointedly humorous sense of contemplative reverence.

Within the installation, audience-participants can engage in “confessional” conversation with a neighbour through a lattice separating the adjacent booths; or they can confess textually, through cathartic graffiti, directly onto the booth’s walls, or by writing onto provided paper scrolls which are then deposited into the vestibule’s substructural plumbing. These variegated modes of activation enliven the installation through actions which are cathartic and socially-engaged without being prescriptive, didactic, or confrontational.

This project, like Sappyfest, inhabits a space of comforting hypnagogia; it is connective, poetic, serious, humorous; it is light and heavy simultaneously, not unlike our Bridge Street hearts.

Teagan and Jacob are Mi’kma’ki (Sackville)-based post-BFA mixed media visual artists, collaborators and friends whose work together has grown out of the spaces in between literature and art. Teagan describes Jacob as a colourfully capped, quietly smiley guy, who secretly wants to talk to you and hear all you have to say; Jacob describes Teagan as a boundlessly-effervescent, unflinching optimist whose capacity for bringing people together can only be explained by magic.