CATHY BUSBY\, DAVID MACWILLIAM\, RACHELLE SAWATSKY\, KRISTA BELLE STEWART
Curated by JONAH GRAY
Bo ris Groys recently claimed that artworks are inherently sick and require a curator to heal them by including them in an exhibition.[1] While this was likely more of a rhetorical flourish than a programmatic statement\, it nev ertheless highlights the power imbalances that permeate both art and therap y as ideas and practices. The works in this exhibition reconsider some of t he many historical and contemporary intersections of art and therapy\, seek ing\, in the process\, to question those very power imbalances. Contrary to at least one recent take on this theme\, however\, each of the works in th is exhibition demonstrate that not all art is therapeutic\, nor that its ai m should be to make everyone happy.[2] Where Does it Hurt? brings together four artists whose work thematizes therapy\, or the idea of the therapeutic understood broadly as a treatment meant to relieve or heal. These works re think the relationship between art and therapy\, looking askance at receive d therapeutic methodologies\, and\, especially\, established analogies betw een therapy and the way we encounter and interpret works of art. The formal differences between these works are matched by a corresponding range of sc ales upon which they imagine the therapeutic encounter: from the epistemolo gical to the individual to the social and political. My hope is that the im plicit ellipses between these works will allude to the wide range of approa ches artists are taking towards this theme but that necessity prevents incl uding here.[3]
While Groys’ statement points to the long and often pr oblematic relationship between therapy and the interpretation and distribut ion of artworks\, not all of the connections between these two fields are m etaphorical. Carlo Ginzburg\, for example\, details the influence of connoi sseurial art history upon Freud’s psychoanalytic method in its focus on mar ginal details.[4] As Ginzburg points out\, Freud himself acknowledged his debt to Giovanni Morelli\, who held that brushstrokes contained an essentia l trace of the artist’s hand\; a belief that presaged Freud’s own claims ab out the significance of previously overlooked psychological symptoms.
It is to this shared history that DAVID MACWILLIAM’s large-scale weaving\, Inkblot 031 (2013)\, calls attention. Using the same method that Herman Ro rschach drew upon to create his famous Psychodiagnostik tests in the 1920s\ , MacWilliam has gone a step further by enlarging his inkblots and translat ing them into vividly coloured tapestries. The back of the tapestry\, which is exposed in its current hanging\, is not the exact inverse of the blot o n the front\, but is rather a colourful melange of excluded threads that is tempting to think of as a manifestation of the work’s own unconscious. The jacquard looms upon which this work was made are themselves significant fo r being among the first forms of automated weaving. Through these layers of mediation\, MacWilliam points to the assumption held by early twentieth-ce ntury psychologists\, and their surrealist contemporaries alike\, that auto matism could offer a transparent insight into the unconscious. In doing so\ , this work underlines how the accidental mark\, and other traces of automa tism\, became a privileged stylistic effect that even now is strongly assoc iated with the perceived realism or objectivity of a representation.
RACHELLE SAWATSKY’s paintings also work in and around received analogies be tween pictorial and psychological depth. In particular\, her series The App le and The Doctor (2012) invites observers to read psychological meaning in to egg tempera doodles on found stationery from a psychotherapist’s office. Such readings are easier when the figures and objects are more clearly del ineated\, but many of the paintings also resolutely evade interpretation. A t the same time\, those that do depict rarely slide into familiar diagnosti c narratives. One begins to question the scenario these works implicitly st age. Are they the product of an imagined analysand’s earnest attempts to ex press her inner desires and motivations\, or a strategic defacement? The ab stract\, hazy colours of Sawatsky’s large stretched canvases—both untitled (2014)—also resist narrativization\, exploring instead the affective capaci ties of colour\, shape and scale. Sawatsky describes some of her paintings in this style as “relaxing\,” questioning\, in the process\, models of ther apy that privilege the search for hidden meanings over affective responses.
Whereas the preceding works think of therapy on an individual level\ , or in terms of a two-person relationship—the patient and the doctor—the f ollowing projects approach therapy on a broader scale. KRISTA BELLE STEWART ’s two-part video installation embodies and reflects upon another potential ly therapeutic encounter that is both intensely personal and political. It tells two parallel stories about the life of the artist’s mother\, Seraphin e Stewart—the first Aboriginal public health nurse in British Columbia—with a focus on the elder Stewart’s experience as a former student at the Kamlo ops Indian Residential School. The installation at Artspeak is one of three works by Stewart drawing upon the same source material that are currently on display in Vancouver. The other two are public installations at the City Centre Canada Line station and on dual video screens above Robson and Gran ville streets\, both of which were commissioned by the City of Vancouver Pu blic Art Program as part of Vancouver’s official Year of Reconciliation\, w hich coincided with the National Event of the Truth and Reconciliation Comm ission of Canada held here in September 2013. At Artspeak\, one wall featur es an unaltered projection of the CBC docu-drama\, Seraphine: Her Own Story (1967)\, which portrays the life of the elder Stewart leading up to and sh ortly after her nursing studies. In this video\, the artist’s mother plays her younger self in a series of scripted scenes that are shot in grainy bla ck and white and impressionistically montaged over a jazz soundtrack. Proje cted on the opposite wall are a series of video excerpts from the elder Ste wart’s personal testimony for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.[5] T he dissonance between these two videos—one in which Stewart’s mother tells her own story and another where she reenacts a version of her life accordin g to someone else’s script—is emphasized by the way they confront one anoth er across the screening room. It is significant that Stewart refuses to rec oncile or apply new narratives onto her source material. Reckoning with the effectiveness of the TRC itself as an instrument for personal catharsis\, political therapy and future societal change will require many years and mu ch debate. In the meantime\, Stewart’s work highlights the potential power of simply revealing the personal accounts of former residential school stud ents.
The curators of The Talking Cure—a recent group exhibition at O akville Galleries that featured works from Andrea Fraser and Melanie Gillig an\, among others—describe a kind of political therapy wherein artists appr opriate palliative methodologies from psychoanalysis or hypnotherapy to ext ernalize structural societal ills. CATHY BUSBY’s Self-Help Library (1994) t akes a slightly different approach\, focusing instead on gathering material evidence of those same societal ills. The library itself consists of an ar chive of close to 300 self-help books\, ranging from pulpy bestsellers—aime d at correcting “inefficient behaviours” and the like—to empowering feminis t manuals for adult survivors of child abuse. Self-Help Library embodies a socio-historical record of (purported) therapeutic cures\, and\, by extensi on\, also of the tremendous constellation of anxieties and ailments that af flicted the largely English-speaking North American society within which th ese books originally circulated. In spite of not having incorporated new ti tles since its last iteration in the 1990s\, Self-Help Library is now once again an active therapeutic resource for those who page through its volumes seeking a do-it-yourself means to healing.
Busby’s work was original ly assembled for an exhibition at the New Museum in New York in 1994\, only to be remounted two years later at the Banff Centre’s satellite gallery in Calgary. There\, it was shown along with several related works\, including a version of the poster\, This Book Can Change Your Life\, currently on di splay in the front window of Artspeak. The present exhibition takes its nam e from the latter exhibit in Calgary\, which was also called Where Does it Hurt? This gesture underlines the structures of repetition that the works i n this show use to think through art and therapy: from the front and back o f the tapestry\, to the play between flatness and depth in the paintings\, to the juxtaposed video projections\, and\, finally\, the library’s archive of ailments and cures. I hope the choice of title will be understood both as a tribute to Busby’s long-term engagement with art and therapy as well a s a way to acknowledge the historical precedents of the current renewed int erest in this topic.
Photo: Cathy Busby\, Self-Help Library\, 199 4\, 1996\, 2014\, books