AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
What would you consider a failure? - losing a job, a breakup, maybe a college rejection. For Melissa Lee (ph), it was a botched attempt at making a pair of pants.
MELISSA LEE: Because I had sewn using two-way stretch and put it the wrong way, these pants, like, would basically suction to your legs, and you couldn't get them on.
RASCOE: Lee wanted to wear the pants onstage with her goth rock band but ended up being very disappointed.
LEE: I spent so much money on this fabric. I spent all weekend working on these. I was so excited to use them. And I'm like, what? What do I do?
RASCOE: That question was answered when she saw flyers around Vancouver for something called the Museum of Personal Failure.
LEE: I was like, finally, a place for them. You know, they belong here. Like, they don't deserve to be in craft purgatory, where I never want to deal with them again.
RASCOE: Thirty-four-year-old film industry worker Eyvan Collins was behind the quirky, makeshift art project. They found a temporary space for the museum in Vancouver's Kingsgate Mall and started to collect things. Walking into the gallery, there's a wedding dress from a failed marriage, a spilled bucket of paint, even knives that don't work. Each with a note explaining how the object represents a shortcoming that stuck with them. Elizabeth Armerding's (ph) tarantula, Rosie (ph), had died, and Colombo (ph) the cat went missing.
ELIZABETH ARMERDING: Creatures that I adopted and then failed to keep safe.
RASCOE: So what did she offer up to the Museum of Personal Failure?
ARMERDING: Rosie the tarantula herself because I kept her body in a jar since she died in 2013. I know, dramatic. And for Colombo's story, I submitted the lost cat poster I put around the neighborhood when he went missing.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RASCOE: Jamie Greenberg (ph) submitted music.
JAMIE GREENBERG: "$33 Bill (Failed Album)" is the title. It's six short instrumentals from when I just started learning how to make music.
RASCOE: Greenberg remembers the work he put into failing with his early music.
GREENBERG: You know, downloading music production software, opening it. You're just clicking random buttons. You don't understand the interface, how does any of this work. You watch a tutorial. You're trying to click just how the guy on YouTube is clicking and the sounds, like, (vocalizing) ding, right? Like, and you think if you could just click them in the right way, it'll sound good.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RASCOE: In recent months, artist Shawna Ariel's (ph) work had been rejected from a number of exhibits. So she made a dress out of rejection letters.
SHAWNA ARIEL: Oh, you said no to me. I'm going to put you on my dress. And that's how I'm coping and dealing with my failure, is by being proud of it, owning it.
RASCOE: Ariel says sharing her rejections felt cathartic.
ARIEL: We're all human. We're all trying. And, you know, it was my kind of therapy for myself, I guess, you could say.
RASCOE: And that's exactly what museum founder Eyvan Collins says they wanted, for people to find beauty in the shared human experience of failure.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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