Life Ineffable – Daniel Fisher, Cl? Laurencelle, Sandra Yuen MacKay

Curated by: Cate Curtis Artists: Seminar on Creativity and Madness  July 15, 1-3pm.
Ineffable commonly means that which can’t be described in words and less commonly unspeakable, that which is taboo. The sense of evading verbal description applies to this show.  Visual art is descriptive without words, and has the potential to describe emotional states and ways of being universally.  Similarly the experience of mania, psychosis and other altered states defy description in the usual way and are well grasped and conveyed in the immediate sensory form of visual art.

The experience of Mental Illness is often viewed as taboo and is often edited out of the expressive field by the society that silences it. Both of the definitions of this word apply to this show of artists with mental health diagnoses.

The work of these three artists is similar in that they all have elements of the poetic, and the elusive, and therefore the ineffable. These artists have worked at their craft in a dedicated fashion for some time, and their work is highly individual and yet it what it holds in common is that it is all evocative of emotion, and a paradoxically symmetrical imbalance, but this is arrived at by different avenues of expression.

Paradoxically a society that prefers silence on the subject of Mental Illness expects it of its artists. “Madness” is almost a prerequisite for being an artist.