Today, on the one year anniversary of the Lewiston mass shooting, the city, and state as a whole, are still carrying the burden of loss and trauma. As the Lewiston community pauses to remember the victims and honor survivors, two local artists are offering their own contribution to the public memory of the tragedy: an installation crafted from items left behind at impromptu memorials.
At the Maine Museum of Innovation, Learning, and Labor in Lewiston, artist Tanja Hollander stepped into a small room filled with 261 empty bouquet sleeves suspended from the ceiling.
"You can spin them," she said, as the sleeves bump up against each other, crinkling softly. "I love the sound that they make when they hit each other. It's very gentle."
A small fan hidden near the ceiling pushed a soft breeze through the room, just enough to send the plastic sleeves twisting on their gossamer threads. They caught the light and cast ghostly shadows on the wall.
They dangled alone or in bunches, big and small, some with petals still smushed inside them. They're all different, Hollander said, but also the same.
"And I think that that really represents the community, right?" Hollander said. "We're all grieving together, but there are these moments of individuality in how we grieve."
After the shootings, Hollander, who lives in Auburn, watched as impromptu memorials sprouted up outside the bowling alley and the bar.
She said she felt drawn to the bouquet sleeves in particular. At the first snowfall of the year, and with the help of the Lewiston Public Works Department, she gathered them by the dozen.
"They had this emotional value to me that I don't think I totally understood at the time," she said. "But I really like the idea of recycling something that was meant to be trash and making something beautiful out of it."
The recycling of tragedy has become a theme of the museum's work since the shooting, said director Rachel Ferrante.
A space that has been dedicated to housing artifacts from the area's former textile, shoe, and brickmaking industries is now also home to countless objects left at the makeshift memorials for those lost a year ago.
"We're never probably going to be able to display everything that we collected. It's just too much," Ferrante said.
And she said the collection keeps growing, as residents drop off all manner of items with some connection to the shootings - a painted banner, a miniature cornhole board, a bowling pin with the names of the 18 victims written in black marker.
The museum is also gathering oral history interviews from that night, documenting an unwanted, but now inescapable, chapter of Lewiston history.
"Saving the objects and then collecting the related stories was where we felt like we could provide something to the community," Ferrante said.
The centerpiece — the bouquet sleeve installation — will be on display until next September. It's a collaboration between Hollander and Miia Zellner, another local artist and teacher.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, with a shelter in place order still in effect and a frantic manhunt underway, Zellner drew attention by hanging over a hundred cardboard hearts across town.
"I felt like I had to give back something. You know, as an artist, I can't just sit with my feelings," Zellner said. "I have to make something."
Crafting the bouquet sleeve exhibit, she said, was another step in transforming feeling into action, grieving into art.
Zellner hesitates to use the word "healing" when talking about the impact of her work, especially, she said, given the ongoing toll of gun violence across the country.
But for visitors to the museum, she wants the quiet room of empty flower sleeves to be an invitation to pause.
"I hope that they can process in some way, they can grieve in some way, or they just are able to reflect," she said.
One of those visitors, Rachel Goulet, who grew up in Lewiston, hesitated on the threshold before stepping into the room. All these bouquet sleeves, mouths wired open, holding...nothing. It seemed to catch her by surprise.
"This seems so empty," she said, her voice cracking. "I didn't think I'd feel this way."
Her cousin, Diane Baillargeon, stood at her shoulder.
"You feel the emptiness of what is left," she said.
Eighteen lives lost, and all that is left, Baillargeon said, is the air — a final breath.
