After enjoying Margaret Atwood and sharing some brief conversations with teacher-friends, I headed over to the Art Gallery of Calgary.I hadn’t visited this exhibit yet and knew that this would be a good time…alone and in the quiet.  Sure enough, I was on my own in the gallery space…a single woman completing her visit, as I entered.

By the time I got to the very top floor, almost an hour later,  I was weeping.

The exhibit puts the individual in touch with the atrocities that are perpetrated against women all over the world…as individuals and as a collective.  While the public sometimes reflects a certain weariness with such issues, it is a crucial thing that citizens continue to shine light upon the myriad of global situations that are both overt and pushed under the radar.  Art has this amazing power to be able to say the things that the public silences.  This exhibit SPEAKS.

I did not leave a message on the tree because, even anonymously, the leaves that contain the stories are still too vulnerable.