Art can be a great way to inform people about public health issues. Mindset at Artscape Youngplace is a juried photography exhibition about mental health. The crowded show unexpectantly starts in the hallway of the second floor and spans both sides from the door, so I decided to start from the left.
Installation view. Photo: Sunny Kim
Claudette Abrams’ photographs hang at the end of the left hallway. “Addie & Max” shows a girl and a boy. The realistic part of the picture has been cut off under their eyes and the colors crudely dragged down, suggesting some kind of distortion disorder. Jaene Castrillion documents a young native woman’s journey. Her story comes to life through three vertically displayed photographs: she is hugging a scarred tree while looking into the camera, her arm with scars of cuts, and standing at a beautiful lakeside. The images suggest self-reflexion: a painful past followed by liberation.
Claudette Abrams, Addie & Max, 2015. Courtesy of Artscape Youngplace
Jaene Castrillion, Reftections. Photo: Sunny Kim
Marta McKenzie’s work, “Anger Due to Lydia; Push to Reset; Bliss” is a series of photographs that are both personal and informative about mental health. Three photographs are repeated three times, to make a long horizontal nine-picture display. The first picture is a construction sign that originally said ‘Danger due to Demolition’. The letter “D” has been erased and the word ‘demolition’ has been replaced with the word ‘Lydia’, reading, ‘Anger due to Lydia’. The second picture shows a button that reads ‘Push to Repeat’. The third picture is a neon store sign that reads ‘Bliss’. McKenzie illustrates how our ‘peace of mind’ is not a permanent state of our being, but a short-lived phase that takes hard work – one can easily slip in and out without precedence.
Marta McKenzie, Anger Due to Lydia; Push to Reset; Bliss, 2015. Photo: Sunny Kim
The right side of the hallway has quite a different atmosphere. Perhaps because it is close to the guitarist playing psychedelic, ambient, and grim music, the photographs themselves seem to carry a similar overtone. Marco Buonocore displays a set of photographs that – even though they were taken in daylight – seem gloomy maybe because they are black and white. The pictures are of suburban houses, and numbered randomly 1, 4, 2, 5, 3. I still felt compelled to look at them in their numerical order. Fences are the common theme of the photographs: classic white picket fences that both isolate and protect. In picture #3, the fence takes up half of the photograph; the sharp white fence paired with dark windows produce a rather eerie atmosphere. I can almost see a person in the window, peeking out – but it is just my imagination, I hope. The dark stylization of these images makes me think of a distant past, where hazy memories haunt the present.
Marco Buonocore, Untitled #3 (White Fence), 2010. Courtesy of the artist
Heather Fulton, Boiled, 2014. Courtesy of Artscape Youngplace
Memories is what Heather Fulton deals with in her works as well. “Boiled” was perhaps the most interesting and complex piece for me in this show, both in aesthetics and process. She describes how she intentionally damaged (by boiling) the film role, then went outside and photographed the world. The result is an intricate photo that could be mistaken for a micro-bacteria slide. It is not representational but a quite heavily distorted view of reality. It is compelling because the camera itself had photographed something representational, only to result in non-corresponding images. This process speaks most closely about mental health. There is always attempts in every patient’s life at wanting to be ‘normal’ – whatever that is – but the mind is unable to cope or adapt. The cluster of ‘organisms’ in “Boiled” are moving, textured, and faded. However, it’s not faded in a meaningless, forgetful way: it’s faded in a focused, vignette-like way, like a faded memory we’re desperate to get back.
Sunny Kim
*Exhibition information: Mindset / Claudette Abrams, Marco Buonocore, Jaene Castrillon, Heather Fulton, Hayley Harrington, Marta McKenzie, Annette Seip, Carrie Steenburgh, Monika Szopinska, May 25 – June 13, 2015, Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw Street North, 2nd Floor Public Gallery, Toronto. Gallery hours: Mon – Sun, 8 am – 9 pm.