Western Canada's art magazine since 2002
29 January 2019 Vol 4 No 3 ISSN 2561-3316 © 2019
From the Editor
Portia Priegert
I’ve been thinking about creativity and mental illness, prompted in part by a fascinating documentary I watched over the weekend about Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.
Kusama: Infinity, a 2018 film by Heather Lenz, tells of the countless traumas Kusama has faced over her lifetime. For the last four decades, she has lived in a Japanese mental hospital while making art in a nearby studio.
Kusama began drawing obsessively as a child as a way to cope with visual and aural hallucinations. “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art,” Kusama wrote in her autobiography, Infinity Net.
Her retrospective, recently at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which is purchasing her Infinity Mirrored Room with the help of a crowd-funding campaign, has attracted sold-out audiences during its North American tour.
There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to support a link between creativity and mental illness. And, somehow, a rich and disordered brain does seem likely to produce original ideas. But I wondered if popular understandings are supported by scientific research.
The Beautiful Minds blog of Scientific American by Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at New York’s Columbia University, offers an interesting discussion. My summary of his thinking? It's complicated.
Such musings aside, it's onward to the current issue of Galleries West.
We have a wide range of stories from Mark Mushet’s look at a Vancouver art collective, the Art Mamas, to Lissa Robinson’s review of Shawn Evans’ show in Calgary.
Meanwhile, Beverly Cramp checked out Sean Karemaker’s drawings in North Vancouver and Paul Gessell talked to Saskatchewan artist Lindsay Arnold.
Two additional stories – one about Ray Renooy, formerly a commercial artist in Winnipeg, and the other on Elizabeth Yeend Duer, active in Victoria during the Second World War – round out this issue.
Looking ahead, we’re unspooling stories later this week about Edmonton-based Nigerian artist Emmanuel Osahor and Temosen Charles Elliott, a Coast Salish carver on Vancouver Island. And, of course, we’ll have four more stories next week from Saskatoon, Calgary, Vancouver and a mystery location yet to be determined.
Until next time,
CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE: Beverly Cramp, Paul Gessell, Mark Mushet, Lissa Robinson