Heavy Mental (1995)

Heavy Mental (Toronto: The Power Plant, 1995)

The exhibition of the works of Toronto artists Lyn Cater, Magdalene Celestino, Tom Dean, and Ron Giii took place at the Power Plant, December 8, 1995 - January 21, 1996.

Heavy Mental is an exhibition about the mind’s relation to the body as acted out through the imagination. It is an exhibition about the origins of things and how things come to form. The objects and images on display, therefore, are metaphors for the imagination and the creative process, that which takes place both in the studio and in the presence of the viewer. They are the products of the working-out of an obsession through the nurturing processes of the studio as much as they are directed to the viewer as objects of some sort of provocation. The object is a pivot, being both the conclusion and origin of particular chains of meaning, whether it appears first in the studio or later on display in the gallery.

For more than a decade, the body has been a dominant theme in contemporary art. What with the threat of disease, environmental degradation, and the allure and disquiet of sexual desire and identity, the interest has been justifiable. Heavy Mental reintroduces the mind into the mix. This new mind-body problem is not at all a philosophical issue, nor is it an attempt to reestablish the mind as rational overlord of the body. Rather it is an endeavour to sketch out the mind’s problematic relationships to the body, its own discomfort and dis-ease with its embodiment. These troubled relationships are explored through art objects that are stand-ins for the body.

The works in the exhibition are linked by a sense of the body as something formed and transformed in the unconscious. They thus take their inspiration in part from the tradition of the Surrealist found object. Like the fetishist objet trouvé, the works by these Toronto artists explore mental processes and psychological inventions similar to those incarnated in fetishes and totems, or represented by the uncanny, phobias, madness, schizophrenic mental universes, and spiritual systems.

Surrealism’s legacy is an understanding of the logics of attraction for which the art object is an experimental theatre. The dialectic of attraction and repulsion carried out through the provocation of the work of art ensures that the mental is entwined with the bodily by the agency of the unconscious. The very same agency assists the elaboration of mental universes, even though the logic of their depictions may not be articulated except in some private symbolism.

Surrealism is only one initial reference point for this collection of objects and images; and the fetish is not meant to be any theoretical model, even though the tenets of Freud and anthropology hang heavily over our history, our interpretations, and this exhibition. There are some constants that visual art brings us back to, however, because of what André Breton identified as the primitive states of sensation. Given their forms and materials, many of the objects in the exhibition function like fetishes. That the use of particular materials, such as hair or latex, transforms sense from touch to sight only serves as one more analogy for the creative process and the metaphoric capacity of intelligence.