Take a look at the artwork I Got Up/ I Met / I Went series from 1968-1979 by On Kawara. The artist transforms routine into rituals. Each act of documentation–sending postcards stamped with the exact time he woke, mapping where he walked, recording whom he met. It suggests a compulsion to continue, even when meaning fades. It is in its repetition where both endurance and emptiness lie, reminding us of the echo of doing as a form of not-doing.  

          Finally, Lee Ufan’s From Line (1974) distills the gesture to its vanishing point. Each brushstroke fades as the pigment runs out, tracing the breath between movement and stillness. The act of painting becomes an acknowledgement of its own exhaustion. It is, precisely, the act of letting the gesture stop.  

​

          Together, these works form the emotional architecture of the exhibition: the sagging rope, the mailed timestamp, the fading line–each a record of persistence within limitation. They are a reminder that failure to continue is not the end of a passion, but its most human moment.  

​​

​

​

------------------------------------------------ 

​

​

​

Who we invite  

​

          We invite those who can no longer easily call themselves “artists.” We often say, “I’m an artist,” or “I’m a writer.” but when the doing stops and only the identity remains, the fragile space between practice and self-reveals itself. Have you ever had questions like: how often must you paint to be an artist? Conversely, how long must you not paint before you lose the right to call yourself one?  

​

          Your eyes may still be fascinated by the composition, light and colour of some other artwork–but your hands no longer dare to translate what your eyes see. Have you ever felt ashamed, as though you were a fraud?  

​

          This exhibition is a space for that dissonance, for the failure of unrequited love. We aim to provide a space not for completions, but for those who once professed love to art and now wait for an answer that never returns, for artists who open a sketchbook only to close it again, for drawers filled not with finished works but with projects frozen mid-gesture.  

​

         This feels especially urgent now. Amid widespread burnout, instability, and the ceaseless demand for productivity, many of us are exhausted. And many of us are entangled in complicated relationships with the very work that was meant to sustain us. This exhibition is our response to the fact that difficulty matters; paralysis itself deserves to be seen.  

---

​

What do you say?  

​

          Once, you loved something. And you are forgetting how to do it. If you once loved, what remains in your hands now?

          This exhibition does not ask you to say, “that’s it, I’m done,” to whatever you loved (and certainly still love?). We neither glorify renunciation nor demand release. Instead, we wish to see how you live with your forgetfulness-those you have not yet finished mourning or cannot yet let go.  

​

          Really, what do you say? Do you say goodbye to past passions? Or do you still cry out for it to return? For some, this exhibition may be a farewell. For others, an act of resistance. It need not arrive at a conclusion, for that, too, is a path. To display what could never be finished does not mean to end it. Our aim is not to close, but the refusal of it. We are simply curious about how you continue to walk across all that you could not complete.  

​

          Like you, countless others walk past this hallway each day. What might these walls mean to you? We wish this wall to be a space where you, both as an artist and audience, can acknowledge and make visible the ongoing negotiation between who you were and who you are becoming, between the practice that once defined you and the silence that followed.  

​

---

​

What we look for 

​

          We welcome works that locate hesitation, stagnation, and the fragile act of not-quite-doing. Unfinished projects, unresolved projects, sketches that circle without closure; process-based collages, annotated pages, diaristic fragments, notes to oneself spiraling into silence or repetition; repeated marks, gestures, or visual journals of ‘not-doing”--works that trace the days, weeks, or months of intention without execution, and works that metaphorically express fatigue, burnout, or creative exhaustion.  

​

          Let your submission be incomplete. Let it stutter, let it totter. Let it become the thing you made when you could not make.  

​

​

​

​​​

​

​

​

Eejin Choi and Mario Zhang

Hart House Art Committee

Student Projects Co-Chairs