Can empathy travel beyond the people we know? Past distant strangers, past the bears and swallows and oak trees, and out to whole ecosystems? That is the question at the heart of "Framing entanglement," a photography exhibition opening at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre in Fredericton this October. The show gathers the photographs and stories of thirty environmental stewards — people living and working across New Brunswick who have committed themselves to protecting and restoring the province's ecosystems and all the beings that live in them.
The exhibition is embedded in a research project on empathy and human-nature relationships. Its organizers wanted to learn how empathy is understood, felt, and practiced by the people on the front lines of conservation. The result is not a conventional nature show. It is a portrait of a relationship — between people and the living world they have chosen to defend — and an invitation to consider what would happen if that empathy were extended further than most of us usually allow.
An opening night is planned for Saturday, October 3, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre, featuring a discussion with the researcher behind the project alongside several of the stewards, photographers, and storytellers who took part. There will be time and space for informal dialogue and questions, and snacks. For those who cannot attend the opening, the exhibition remains on display from October 5 to 16, so it can be visited at a later date.
The venue itself carries a long history of public life in Fredericton. The Charlotte Street Arts Centre occupies the old Charlotte Street School, an historical building dating back to 1884. The building is recognized as a Protected Provincial Historic Site for its architectural significance and its association with Mott. In its later life it became the Charlotte Street Arts Centre, a focal point for creation, presentation, and education in the arts in downtown Fredericton. Its auditorium, where the exhibition will be mounted, seats hundreds and is equipped with lighting and sound systems suited to performances as well as gatherings like this one. The building's own history — a place built for teaching children, later remade as a home for the arts — gives the exhibition a fitting setting, since the show is itself an act of teaching and re-learning: how to feel for beings whose lives are not our own.
The questions the exhibition poses are deliberately large. Can we extend empathy beyond our immediate social groups to distant strangers, to more-than-human beings like bears, swallows, and oak trees, and maybe even to whole ecosystems? And what would happen if we did? The organizers describe the show as asking — and partially answering — those questions. The answers come in the form of thirty New Brunswickers, each photographed and each with a story, each already practicing some version of the empathy the project is trying to understand.
The exhibition runs at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre Auditorium, 732 Charlotte St., Fredericton, from October 5 to 16, 2026, with the opening discussion on the evening of October 3.