Mar 25’ to Present
In The Dream House
by JoAnn Stevelos & Sarah Blesener
In the Dream House
Created by Sarah Blesener and JoAnn Stevelos
In the Dream House is a collaborative, interdisciplinary project investigating how we engage with visual archives through a trauma-informed lens, aiming to make visible the absences that have been excluded from historical narratives and, in doing so, create opportunities for recovery, reworking, and reimagining the stories we tell. In the Dream House centers on the archive and lived experience of JoAnn Stevelos, who survived the decade-long abuse perpetrated by her stepfather, a Catholic priest, against her and her four siblings and her mother, who not only allowed the abuse but meticulously documented their lives together in photo albums - assembling a history as she wanted it to be remembered.
This work is interested in the gaps, silences, absences and redactions that often permeate archives, especially in the context of traumatic histories and survivor testimonies. How can we bridge the boundaries between private and public memory in mourning and grief? How can participatory visual storytelling practices be integrated into recovery? By reimagining how we work with our personal and collective archives, we create a space where healing becomes a shared responsibility—one that embraces creativity, compassion, and mutual support.
This project explores how archives—both personal and collective—can support survivors of trauma by reactivating them through sensory memory and creative interventions such as the use of flowers, heirlooms, and memorabilia. Rather than focusing on erasure, we aim to work with archives in ways that honor the experiences of survivors while fostering recovery and growth. We are interested in integrating participatory methodology and therapeutic techniques, focusing on care-driven, rather than state-driven, methods to transform trauma into creative spaces for creativity and healing.
As JoAnn writes: “We placed my mother’s albums on everyday objects, as if setting the past down gently in the life I had built—offering it a place to rest. A life I was, in many ways, seeing for the first time. Petals from the flowers I had bought that morning were placed over the faces of my siblings in one photo, covering them with something soft, something ephemeral. It was a gesture of care. An offering. A way to hold what could not be undone. The past became something to study, not just something to endure. It was not just a revisiting, but a reckoning. The camera turned these places into evidence—of what happened, of what was lost, of what remained. And in that way, it felt like collaboration. It felt like the story was ours to shape.”
April 25’ to Present
Architecture of the Trap
by JoAnn Stevelos & Sarah Blesener
What Do We Do With the Photos of Monsters?
My sister said, “Burn them all.”
My brothers wanted nothing to do with them.
But I couldn’t look away.
When the photo albums arrived, carefully packed in black nylon bags, they were almost absurd in their neatness. Years of holidays, birthdays, vacations—each image a performance of normalcy. My mother, smiling in a sleeveless sundress. Frank, the priest, our “Dad,” in a bathing suit, barbecuing. The children—us—posed like offerings.
In Monsters, Claire Dederer writes that we are all monsters in our own way, and the question is not whether we are monstrous but what kind of monster we are. But what kind of monster documents crimes in soft light and wide smiles? What kind of monster builds an archive to deny the very thing it records?
These albums are their masterpiece—not because they are art, but because they are proof of the performance. A choreography of control. A curated innocence.
So what do we do with the archive?
Do we destroy it, in solidarity with the rage that wants obliteration?
Do we keep it, as evidence of harm and the impossibility of clean memory?
Do we alter it, annotate it, reclaim it?
The Architecture of the Trap began here—in the tension between preservation and obliteration. We decided not to burn the albums. Not because we forgave, or forgot. But because they are not just their record. They are ours, too. The backdrop of our survival. The set of our childhood. The place where the trap was laid—and where we began learning how to get out.
The question isn’t just: What do we do with the monster’s image?
It’s: What do we do with the part of ourselves that once loved the monster, trusted the monster, called the monster “Dad”?
We don't reframe the past to make it palatable.
We reframe the archive to make the future truthful.
***
The albums weren’t just filled with their faces. They were filled with ours.
There’s one photo of Frank holding a pacifier. Sarah and I noticed it during our first dive into the albums and set it aside. It was disturbing—yet profoundly intriguing. We knew we would do something with it eventually; we just didn’t know what.
When we came across it again during our deeper excavation of the archive at Arts, Letters, and Numbers, we had the same reaction. We placed it on our work table and left it there for days. I would pick it up now and then, still just as perplexed.
Toward the end of our residency, we took the photo outside. Instinctively, I placed it next to an image of my mother doing her makeup in a mirror—one I assumed Frank had taken. We laid them together in a patch of tall grass beside a stream. A new frame for the image: vertical, tender, held in green and water.
Later, Sarah arranged them side by side on a metal grate, blades of grass poking through. The photos had found a new home. The monsters had a new shape.
And suddenly, their story felt less monstrous.
More ordinary.
The ordinariness of being a monster.
The ordinariness of having a monster’s story.
***
Do I destroy that photo because it hurts? Or do I keep it because it tells the truth about what was done to me—and how well I learned to hide it?
These are not just moral questions. They are archival questions. They are survivor questions.
Because this isn't just about them. It's about what happens when an entire system colludes to make the monster seem safe. What happens when mothers smile in photos they staged. When churches reassign men like Frank to new parishes. When silence becomes the price of family.
Claire Dederer asks, "What is the cost of our complicity?" But children don’t have the luxury of complicity. We have only survival.
And what do you do when survival looks like complicity in the photos?
The albums make that clear. They are not random snapshots; they are instruments of forgetting. A mother's curation. A priest’s erasure. A child's forced performance.
And yet, they are also the beginning of a map.
Not a path out, exactly—but a record of where we were trapped.
Of what it looked like.
Of how close we came to disappearing.
***
Gabor Maté writes that trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you as a result. For me, that meant splitting.
There was the self who knew. Who screamed inside. Who disappeared into vodka miniatures, who left her body during dinner, who watched herself from the ceiling.
And there was the other one—the good daughter. The one who smiled for the photo. Who knew how to fold her hands in church. Who thanked Frank for ice cream. Who posed next to him in Polaroids that still make my stomach turn.
The albums hold both selves. And that’s what makes them so hard to hold.
To destroy them would be to deny the good daughter ever existed—to erase the performance I had to give to stay safe.
To keep them as-is would be to accept the lie they were meant to tell.
To alter them is something else entirely.
It’s not revenge. It’s not closure.
It’s artistic intervention. It’s archival reclamation. It’s survival as authorship.
We began experimenting—scanning the photographs, isolating hands and mouths. Writing new captions. Obscuring his face. Circling mine. Extracting the marginalia—my mother’s neat labels, her dates and events and passive verbs. Easter, 1983. Frank with kids. At home.
At home.
We started asking: Can a photograph be repossessed?
Can the story embedded in it be unfolded?
Not to change what happened, but to change what it means?
What does it mean to take back a picture?
It means we no longer play our assigned parts.
It means we strip the image of its power to lie.
It means we build The Architecture of the Trap not as a gallery of horror, but as a blueprint of survival.
Because it’s not just the monster’s archive anymore.
It’s ours now.
And we are not burning it.
We are reimagining how to live with it.
How to live with the monsters in the photos.