Otherwise (2018)

In June 2018, I was preparing for my doctoral candidacy exam and the exhibition of my artistic research that it would take place in called Telling Stories Otherwise. I was looking back at all of my work. My time in Iqaluit thinking about suicide, my time with cancer, and my time with madness. I looked at the images from the psychiatric hospital and all the memories I created with those patients. I looked at the body of paintings I produced in a fever during my manic episode a year before. I was learning a 3D-rendering program, Cinema 4D, and I created space for these works to inhabit. I didn't yet understand that art made worlds, but it was there. They were spaces for my own and others' trauma to inhabit, to heal.

These were unbelievably demanding renders to create a photograph, often taking a day or two for the computers to process the image. I had a room full of computers working on images. In July, I wanted to try turning one of these photographs into a video. Kissing Otherwise took five computers three weeks to create its 3600 individual frames or 2-minutes of video. In it was one of the final paintings created during my mania, One of Us Will Die First, a 6 x 9-foot oil on canvas. The video has two abstract forms caught in a dance together as the portrait of my wife and I kissed, reconciled after going through the unimaginable.

In November, after another manic episode that took away September and October, I was trying to get creative again. To get things going. At that point, I was ecstatic because Lindsey Sharman, the Art Gallery of Alberta's new curator, was interested in seeing my animations. Before our studio visit, I made a 3-minute video Why Are Our Museums Full of Tears Otherwise, based on the poem America by Allen Ginsberg that was part of my Alberta #2 series, thinking about the museum I might soon have a chance to be in. It was a moment of transition, both technically and in every other way. It was the end of the Otherwise series, the end of my doctorate.