BILLINGS — For the past nine months, the Yellowstone Art Museum’s "Post-it Note Project," a deeply personal and interactive exhibit, has invited the community to leave colorful reminders on walls and windows—each one a piece of memory, loss, and healing.
The multi-part project is the brainchild of Billings artist, mentor, and meditation guide Krista Marshall Pasini. From floor to ceiling, her studio is filled with a sea of vibrant sticky notes with messages from both her and museum visitors.
"It feels just like a kaleidoscope. These prisms of light just keep spilling out," said Pasini.
The project sits behind the museum’s main campus in the Visible Vault where its permanent collections are kept. Pasini is the museum's artist-in-residence and has full access to the studio space.
“I think it's really interesting because it does provide this kind of peek behind the curtain where you can see some of the daily operations and the daily work of an art museum," said Luke Ashmore, the museum's communications manager. "Krista is (our) first performance artist."
The room holds a deeper meaning than just pieces of paper on a wall. The project is a testament to Pasini’s father, Terry Marshall, and his battle with Lewy body dementia—a progressive neurological disease that slowly robbed him of his memories.
"Maybe even as early as '89, some of these symptoms were starting up, and so he worked and survived and also suffered through that disease until he passed away in 2014," said Pasini.
For Pasini and her family, it was difficult to watch her father's gradual progress over the years, and describes the disease as a "death by inches."
“I have two older siblings, and my mom always says we each had a different dad just because of how that disease evolved, and I'm the youngest, so I watched them end stages much more intimately because I was in the house,” said Pasini.
Her father would use Post-it notes and laminated cards around the house as reminders in his daily routine. While most were simple commands, like "Feed the dogs," they were also often humorous and poignant. His notes, journals, and letters became lifelines, preserving his thoughts, emotions, and personal reflections as his memory faded.
Two years before his death, Pasini realized that her father would not be able to tell his own story and wanted to find a way to honor him.
“I asked him if I could tell his story, and he approved. He said, 'You should name it 'Stuck on You,'' because, at the time, part of the joke of him remembering things was facilitated through sticky notes,” said Pasini.
After his passing, it took Pasini 10 years to create the project as it is today. She wanted to involve the audience in a way that allowed them to include their own stories while Marshall's story still lives inside. By staying true to sticky notes as a medium, Pasini is channeling her father’s voice to speak through them, ensuring that his story is told through his own words.
"It had to be rooted in something he wrote or something that wasn't a conjecture or a storytelling from our perspective, and so I felt like I was honoring, at least in that way, like I'm not telling the story from my vantage and letting his words be the end of the story," said Pasini.
The project is divided into two parts, the "Note to Self" exhibit featuring the notes themselves, and "Stuck on You" with the performances that are put on. The performances are a mix of Pasini’s love for storytelling and her background in performance art, with each live performance chapter exploring her father's life and career, while also diving into a new phase of his experience with dementia.
Pasini constructed a total of six chapters of live performances, each using her father's notes, journals, letters, and family text messages to construct the piece. The set for each story changes, with the final performance, titled "Known Traveler," taking place in a faux airport departure lounge, signaling both the end of life and the act of letting go.
“I usually talk about it as like the poetics of an airport, the arrivals, and departures. Set inside my dad's story, it's the last five dreams of a dying man," said Pasini. "It's an ensemble cast, and for those that have been coming to each chapter, it's full of wonderful Easter eggs and kind of putting out the landing gear, I'll say, of this long-form journey.”
Each performance has brought a guest ensemble cast to act and bring their own unique narratives within the piece. For the final chapter, Pasini will be joined by Mehmet Casey, Sherri Cornett, Sonia Davis, Patrick Scott-Wilson, and Billie Parrott, along with her partner, Mike Pasini.
“To see these performances bring people together, and I think that crowd interacting with an artist, it provides a different feeling, especially at an art museum, then you might have expected," said Ashmore. “I feel like that just develops a relationship with that project or that artist more than someone you have some unfamiliarity with.”
Throughout the experience, attendees are also invited to leave their own sticky notes on the walls, adding personal messages and memories. Throughout the experience, Pasini has seen a moving mix of emotions from the visitors.
"I've had people put tears. They're putting it up with a tear in their eye because it's really important that they put that note there and that they know someone else is going to see it," said Pasini.
As the project draws to a close this weekend, Pasini will begin the process of archiving the thousands of sticky notes that have filled the vault, marking a bittersweet closure to a deeply personal journey. While the notes may be taken down, the memories they represent will not be forgotten while also paving the way for new ones.
"I've gone through my dad's life over the past nine months, but I've gone through it with artists and audience members and built new memories to live with the real ones, and so I think it is a bit of a repair process, too," said Pasini.
The room has acted as a representation of memories and the fond ones we wish to hold on to for just a bit longer. For Pasini, it is the ones of her father, but now free of his illness, he lives on in the shared experiences she has collected, turning grief into something beautiful.
"Every time we touch a memory, we change it because we're coming to it, again, as a person we are now with different information and different experience," said Pasini. "We don't need to hold so tightly to something because we simply can't. We're going to be changing the memory every single time we revisit it."
The "Known Traveler" performances will end this weekend with two performances on Saturday at 6 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Gary & Melissa Oakland Studio in the Visible Vault on 505 N 26th St.
