How do you write about a show like Group
Therapy, how do you convert the experienced of this multi-layered, complex
collection of works. Without controlling or predetermining the virgin viewers perceptions.
Also as the exhibition (or expedition) is the exploration of
the juncture between mental health and contemporary technologies. Can I make it
through without a hackneyed and redundant statements like: ‘people be crazy’ or
‘who’s the truly insane?’
What is my experience of this subject? It mostly comes from
my favourite authors, Philip K Dick. Who famously went through a major
psychotic transformation or breakdown, which gave us the book VALIS. I think
the point I’m trying to make is that within my nominal mind is the idea of
mental breakdown as a transforming experience, one of potential and change.
This feels like a fantasy. Often mental distress is
accompanied by fear and isolation. My small experience of this came through the
experience of anxiety attacks. Perhaps a very common form of mental distress. Though
many people have similar experience, as far as you’re aware you’re the only one
to feel this way.
How can you express any experience of mental activity? If you
could then at least you could begin to understand what’s happening to you and therefore
others can understand. Which seems to be the mission of Jennifer Kanary
Nikolov(a)’s Labyrinth Psychotica. An attempt to recreate the conditions of psychosis
in a psychical experience.
Once in that maze, grabbing and reaching for the curtains
which define the maze. Textures change, alter I keep my hand up feeling the
materials as they pass my hand. This becomes at once worrying and yet
comforting. As you field of vision becomes a grey palette what you’re walking
into become less defined. The fabric walls increasingly become your world, they
ground you.
The sensation is that you might be falling but your falling
in the right direction. They might be huge gaps that are going to swallow you,
but they’re your gaps, your path.
Though at first that path seems short as I get stuck going
back and forth from the start to the first hallucination post. This posts of
bright LED lights throw up images when you quickly dart your eyes back and
forth. In do so an image of Marilyn Monroe floats in front of me. I think of
Ballard I think of The Atrocity Exhibition.
Eventually I find a path through bleeping LED lights, number
displays flashing its importance. The numbers are relevant somehow. Voices are
heard and compete with the knowledge that the only person nearby is the
friendly invigilator.
Is this then the essence of mental distress, of psychosis? The
ghost experience, of things that are there but not. It’s like the solidification
of imagination, these things; feelings exist for me they are part of my world. When
these experiences don’t manifest themselves within the world or culture around you
that seems to be a problem.
After an encounter with a demanding set of headphones. I find
myself stumbling out of the maze, pretty sure of what’s happened but not. Dressed
in a lab coat (did I mention you get to wear a lab coat? You do!) The
impression of being involved in an experiment is great. The sensations felt
while in the Labyrinth Psychotica do leave you with the imprint of the conditions
of psychosis and having that can act as a started point to better explain, to
lay persons like me, what that term actual means. Therefore you can better
understand the person.
Initially I thought I would write more widely about the
Group Therapy exhibition. Rather than
focus one piece, for me the Labyrinth Psychotica distils some of the themes of
this exhibition. From the use of technology to deepen the understanding the
individual experience, to how the whole exhibition serves as a ‘maze’ which requires
exploration and investigation.
On leaving and after foundling the pillows in the MadLove
Asylum I feel the need to return and carry on exploring. Also, somehow, the
outside feels different now…
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