In the second week of the unit we took a break from the paper bag project to visit the art exhibition at Comox Valley Art Gallery. Three artists who shared a common studio in Winnipeg were exhibiting together for the first time. There work and media were very different. Reva stone explores the connection between people and technology in this exhibition. Diana Thorneycroft exhibited several of her rather dark drawings she created during the height of the covid outbreak which included people animal hybrids and the cycle of infection, Aganetha Dyck exhibited her work which involved, among many other techniques, placing a rage of objects into specially modified beehives to enable the bees to modify them by applying wax to them.
I was particularly drawn to the work of Reva and Aganetha as I have a personal connection to their work. One of Reva’s pieces is entitled Medcolater and is an electric shock therapy machine combined with a video screen which displays clips relating to theories of brain function and changing forms of psychiatric treatment.
This exhibit brought back many painful memories. My wife is bipolar, and after several suicide attempts she was admitted to the psychiatric ward at Penticton Regional Hospital. There she was given 11 doses of bilateral Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT). This incredibly barbaric therapy involves sending electrical impulses through the brain to generate convulsions and is a treatment of last resort when depression does not respond to antidepressant drugs. While it may have some therapeutic benefits it causes massive short and long term memory loss – you may have seen Jack Nicholson being depicted after similar treatment in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. I had never seen an electric shock therapy machine before. Fortunately after researching the machine in the exhibition, I realized that it was not designed to deliver ECT as Reva may have suggested in her exhibit, but was actually used as treatment for muscle stimulation similar to the TENS machines used by massage therapists and chiropractors today. but I get where she was coming from.