One Year ago. We had the Grand Opening of the Wheel of Time Gallery. In a house that was supposed to be demolished by now. Our time is extended…On Friday we are having a short and sweet art show.
In honour of this special day. Here is an excerpt on the strange origin story of the gallery.
“I remember going wild with painting everything white. Some might say obsessive. I could’t stop. It first started with my room walls. Then the ceiling. After that, I said, well maybe I should paint the floor too. Then came the door handles, the heaters, the electrical outlets. Nothing was untouched. Once that was done, I was in a completely white room. Top to bottom. Except of course of this light that was coming through. The window. If this is to look like a gallery, then there shouldn’t be a window here. I cut some panels, painted it white and boarded off the window.
All of a sudden I get this intense flashback. When I was 19 or 20 years old, I was attending an experiential course. One of the last exercise had us spend a day at a mental asylum or as we would now say a psychiatric hospital. Not only would we spend the day there, we were expected to come dressed up as clowns. Our job was to to have fun and interact with the people living there. What!? I was not into this idea. This seemed a bit offensive, I thought. Isn’t this being rude. And coming dressed up as a CLOWN, how stupid and weird is that. When I arrived there, the people there were happy and excited to see us. Majority of them wanted to interact with us, and a tiny few that didn’t just continued doing there own thing. The thing that struck me the most, were how these people were stuck living in these small loops. They were trapped inside of some episode, some traumatic event, some blissful moment. It was hard to witness at first, but the longer I stayed, the more comfortable it became. There just people stuck in loops. After that day, I continued with my life and didn’t think back at that experience. I even went to clown school which was inspired by my time working at a clinic with children on the spectrum. However, I never made the connection back to that day.
Fast forward to 2018. Here I am in my completely boarded up white room. No furniture. No items. Nothing. I realize, I just created my own asylum…
Well, before this thing can be a gallery I thought. I must first voluntarily commit myself to my self made asylum. I would be both the patient and the clown. To prepare I undertook a 5 day water fast. Only drinking water. Over the days I would spend time in the asylum. On the last day of the fast, I felt I needed to actually commit, So I took some medicine. At the time a Wise Tarot Man was over at the house. He taught me how to use the cards. To use it as a tool to have a methaphorical conversation with myself. To use the images as symbolic references to my own inner experiences and personal history. The deck follows a journy of the Fool– with this card you can go through the process of human growth and development. We spread the entire 78 cards out on the floor. I would spend 24 hours in the asylum. Lots happened that evening… It was one card that kept on grabbing my attention. It was card number 10. The Wheel of Fortune. “Today is the result of the past, future will be the sum of past and today, and no matter how accurately we plan, the Wheel of Fortune will mix up light and shadow. “The card sums up my experience at the psychiatric hospital many years ago and me in my room in 2018. All the different loops we live in, small to big. I remember thinking, life is kind of like a giant mental asylum. We are all just playing patients. The Wheel of Time Gallery was born.
Matthew Ariaratnam is a sound artist, composer, guitarist, and improviser, who likes to work with sound as sonic material and as a point of connection to create happenings and relational interactions. He manages this through practices of field recording, soundwalking, musicking, and making site-specific performance. He engages with ideas of ontology, epistemology, and multimodal listening. Matthew focuses on how the act of multimodal listening is a way of being in the world that provides specific knowledge and sensorial information, informing our relationships to others, ourselves, our environment, and community spaces.
Neo Oslund is a Visual Artist who explores the medium of Acrylic Paint. His art represents the evolution of technique through experiment. Neo is fascinated with nature and fractals, he utilizes the study of nature to produce art that expresses organic shape and movement.
