This is me in Oberhausen with the infamous Untouchable. Photo by Nelson Henricks. Yep, I’m standing in front of an Indian Trading Post just around the corner from the Filmpalast. It’s true, they really do have an Indian fetish! I got crabby somewhere along this festival, I think it was the movies all afternoon – evening drinking until 2 at after parties getting up and doing it again for a week that got to me. Man, that’s so intense! I miss festivals.
This is a still from the only video I made during the four years on antipsychotics. I translated the names of 12 different pharmaceuticals I had been prescribed into binary code, layered the audio with numbers stations, and talked about global paranoia, love, hospitalization, colonization, and codes.
A typical line drawing of mine. I must have needed to compensate for something the day I drew this.
Lithium nearly killed me. This is a lomo photograph taken while driving over the Granville Street Bridge on a typical Vancouver night. It represents the internal feeling I had being on psychiatric drugs.
This is a still from my grad film Anhedonia. I was still a good consumer then, but I was trying to show how deep depression goes so it got pretty dark. I started sampling more in this film and using audio landscapes instead of just me talking. I also layered the video. My sweet friend Margaret Flood plays the beautiful yet distant girlfriend who shows up and ignores me (just after this frame). She’s a great sport, but every time the cameras roll she gets shy. She and I met in first year and passed notes through art history. She and I laughed at Goya. No really, he did some funny commercial art.
I was asked to create something for Blackflash’s Love On The Prairies postcard series. My sweet cousin Christopher died on the job just before I made this. I scanned in flower petals, put a filter on it, and drew this angelic creature which seemed to represent either him or my feelings for him. He’s holding a ball of pure light because that’s how I saw him the eve of his burial, just a transcendent ball of loving light. I miss him, we all do.
Christopher Ian Cuthand
February 18 1986 – June 2 2006
It’s funny, I could talk about where I am now but I doubt anyone would believe me. Anyway, these were some of my inspirations when I was eighteen and nineteen.
Bjork – Hunter
David Bowie (feat. Trent Reznor) I’m Afraid of Americans
Garbage – When I Grow Up
Public Image Ltd – Rise
Nowhere by Greg Araki
I watched this movie over and over, James Duvall plays an earnest video artist trying to survive the shallowness of LA. This is the Valley Girl scene. James Duvall is a sweet guy BTW.
Basquiat painting downtown circa 1981
This is when I started thinking more seriously about street art. Later on I also discovered Banksy and have been a fan since.
Jenny Holzer
“Abuse of power comes as no surprise”
A televised text. I was really interested in Jenny Holzer’s use of text as art.
Barbara Kruger
“You are not yourself”
The Smiths – How Soon Is Now
The funny thing about this song is it’s the opening for Charmed, which I watched over and over when I had nothing but a t.v. in Montreal. The dialogue always goes something like “I thought we vanquished the demon.” “No, we forgot our special book, and I don’t think your boyfriend is mortal, I think he’s a dark lord.” “Well do we have to vanquish him too?” “I don’t know I’ll go ask Piper.” Seriously!
The Heads – No Talking Just Head
Peggy Lee – Is That all there is?
Cindy Sherman
This is a fan’s tribute video to her.
Sarah Mclachlan – Sweet Surrender
Gran Fury
Barbara Kruger’s work today:
DR: In some cultures, what you are calling a “spiritual emergency” is a recognized part of growth and individuation. In our culture, at least its symptoms are frequently considered pathological. How does our culture move in a more inclusive direction?
SG: My wife Christina and I have written a couple of books -p; one we wrote and the other we edited. We wrote The Stormy Search for the Self and edited Spiritual Emergency, which has articles by other people, pointing in the same direction.
The basic idea is that there exist spontaneous non-ordinary states that would in the west be seen and treated as psychosis, treated mostly by suppressive medication. But if we use the observations from the study of non-ordinary states, and also from other spiritual traditions, they should really be treated as crises of transformation, or crises of spiritual opening. Something that should really be supported rather than suppressed. If properly understood and properly supported, they are actually conducive to healing and transformation.
From spiritualcompetency.com:
Pranic movements or kriyas
Prana is the Hindu word for vital energy. As intense energy moves through the body and clears out physiological blocks, some people experience intense involuntary, jerking movements of the body, including shaking, vibrations, spasm and contraction.
Yogic Phenomena
Some people find themselves performing yogic postures or hand mudra gestures which they have never learned or could not do in a normal state of consciousness. Unusual breathing patterns may appear with either very rapid or slow, shallow breathing.
Physiological Symptoms
Kundalini awakening often generates unusual physiological activity which can present as heart, spinal, gastrointestinal, or neurological problems. Internal sensations of burning, hypersensitivity to sensory input, hyperactivity or lethargy, great variations in sexual desire, and even spontaneous orgasm have been reported.
Psychological Upheaval
Emotions can swing from feelings of anxiety, guilt, and depression (with bouts of uncontrollable weeping) to compassion, love, and joy.
Extrasensory Experiences
Some people experience visions of lights, symbols, spiritual entities. Auditory sensations may include hearing voices, music, inner sounds or mantras. There may also be disruption of the proprioceptive system, with loss of a sense of self as a body, or an out of the body experience.
Psychic Phenomena
A person may experience precognition, telepathy, psychokinesis, awareness of auras and healing abilities.
Mystical States of Consciousness
A person may shift into altered states of consciousness where they directly perceive the unity underlying the world of separation and experience a deep peace and serenity. (see Karin Hannigan, PhD for additional description)
The sudden onset of these experiences led many in Greenwell’s study to become confused and disoriented. Kundalini awakening is probably the most common type of spiritual emergency. The Spiritual Emergence Network Newsletter reported that 24% of their hotline calls concerned kundalini awakening experiences.
___________
Some practitioners, such as John Perry, MD, have argued that medication only inhibits a person’s ability to concentrate on the inner work and it mutes the psychic energy needed to sustain the effort to move the process forward. When medication is used to simply repress the inner process, it becomes frozen in an unfinished state. Suppression can impede the potential for a complete working through to a point of resolution.
Grof believes using psychiatric medication in Kundalini Awakenings can result in death for the now pathologized person. Some people recommend it. Either way informed consent is necessary in the treatment of anyone.
For more information on spiritual awakenings see the Spiritual Emergence Network.
2007 marks the end of a ten year span of Thirza Cuthand’s practice using confessional interventions, both public and anonymous, to reflect the psyche of the world. In 1997 during her first year at Emily Carr she created a site specific installation in downtown Vancouver to address the general tone of isolation, fear, and loss of hope. Using selections from diaries she has written since 1984, she wrote parts onto tags which were glue gunned onto eggs she had cracked, cleaned, dried, and glued back together. These eggs and their accompanying diary selection were placed within the downtown core. Within 24 hours every egg had departed without a trace.
Her confessional practice continued after her positive disintegration moved into a kundalini awakening in 1998. During that time she continued using personal stories in her video practice, which garnered her international attention. Her short video works have screened in festivals across North America, Asia, Europe, South America, and Australia. She has attended the prestigious Oberhausen International Short Film Festival twice and won an honourable mention for “Helpless Maiden Makes an ‘I’ Statement.” She has also screened work at Mix Brasil in Sao Paolo, Transmediale in Berlin, Bienniale de Image et Mouvement in Geneva, Frameline in San Francisco, and various other festivals world wide. Due to government restrictions on travel grants she was often unable to attend her international screenings.
She also began to post anonymously on various diary sites such as Open Diary, Bloop Diary, and Livejournal since 1998 when she finally got internet access. These anonymous confessions briefly stopped in 2002, when she returned to Saskatchewan and began following Riel’s journey to Montreal. She lost contact with the online community until 2003, after she had endured extreme abuse in the hands of the Quebec psychiatric care system. She began writing publically under her own name in her confessional, personal, and ultimately political blog Fit of Pique. Between 2003 and 2007 she went from a psychiatric consumer to a psychiatric survivor and ultimately achieved Secondary Integration after withdrawing from her medication.
During her journey she reclaimed her identity as a Gifted woman, and spoke openly of Positive Disintegration, spiritual searches, abuse, colonization, and the experience of growing up with multiple, sometimes contradictory identities.
The last short film of her very public Positive Disintegration process takes on fascism in contemporary psychiatric care. “Madness In Four Actions” marks a departure from her earlier work. She used collage to tell a story no one would listen to in her own voice. It debuted at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon in the middle of January 2007.
Now 29 years old, Thirza is outlining plans for a Gnostic Soteria house in Saskatchewan for future Louis Riel’s. She is also continuing to write feature screenplays and hopes to some day get funding for her 35mm projects. She is also learning her Cree language and plans to take guitar lessons. She considers herself a modern poet and is a 5th generation survivor of the Northwest Rebellion. Her mother, Ruth Cuthand, is descended from the Cree uprising. Her father, Edward Poitras, is a descendent of the Red River Metis. Both have made enormous contributions not just to the Aboriginal art world but also to the international art world in general. She hopes her work has served in some ways to heal both families. She was raised within the Aboriginal art community and has acquired the affectionate appellation of Art Brat. In 2005 she went back and completed her BFA in Film and Video at Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver BC. She does not claim copyright over the egg intervention and encourage’s it’s use in areas of the world where suffering occurs.
Her next project is a feature documentary charting her bloodlines through DNA, oral storytelling, historical research, and travel to various parts of the world where her ancestors can be found, including Ireland, Scotland, France, Blackfoot territory, Cree territory, Saulteaux territory, and the migration route which led us here.
She believes the military maneuvers of colonialist enterprise have changed little over the millenia, and can now be seen in the current Iraq conflict.
This is Tori Amos’ video for Mary, a song of her 1992 debut album Little Earthquakes. Which was one of those albums I listened to all the time.