johnmcgie.com

Sometimes it is the whisper amongst the screams that carries the message.

Within the Dark and Wounded exhibition artist James Picard has encapsulated art as a conduit that bears witness to the unsaid, the unheard and the unwanted.

It invites us to look at the horrors held within the folds of murky memories of not just others but also ourselves.

The art inhabits the space (Riverview Hospital – an abandoned mental institution) with a familiarity and intimacy usually reserved for long lost friends. Music laments through the hallways serenading decades of decay. It all comes together as one great canvas under the stroke of the artist’s brush.

For some the canvas is a haunted house, for some a sanctuary, for some a memorial and for others a torture chamber.

At its best it overwhelms without making you numb as you to look long into the faces of pain and see yourself – as an inactive participant and an addle onlooker.

It asks not for empathetic complacency but rather a non-intellectualized humanity. The raw, visceral ugly that binds us all together on the deepest, darkest levels of our shadowy emotions.

It is guttural. It is unapologetic. It is honouring.

It is art as an active ingredient – for change, for healing, for evolution.

It is a peek behind the curtain that one day, I hope, will be fully opened.