SORRY Whitehorse (2009)

I first began collecting newspaper apologies after finishing my dissertation the topic of pain and peoples responses to it in 1999. Over the decade I continued to follow the media spectacle of public apologies and gather images and quotes from the mouths of CEOs, politicians, sports stars and others. Some of these apologies are of major historical significance while many are salacious in nature and of little public consequence. SORRY aims to distinguish what is important from what was not in this blur of fleeting media moments.

For this exhibition at the Yukon Arts Centre (Whitehorse), I paired SORRY, featuring 22 recent apology mouth images, with WE ARE SORRY, two panels of edited excerpts from the 2008 landmark apologies to Indigenous peoples made by Prime Ministers Stephen Harper (Canada) and Kevin Rudd (Australia). A large scale version of WE ARE SORRY had gone up as part of the Laneway Commissions public art program in Melbourne, Australia, in July of that year.

Prior to 2009, SORRY was exhibited at MacMaster Museum of Art (Hamilton, ON), Saint Mary's University Art Gallery (Halifax, NS) and the College of Fine Arts (Sydney, Australia), and four SORRY publications share a larger breadth of this collection of mouths and their correlating apologies.