Paranormal performance art takes to the air in Sackville as Leah Garnett receives images telepathically from Montreal

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Ola Wlusek

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After speaking with the Sackville-based artist Leah Garnett about the Telepathic Drawing Session and Drawings on Air, her radio show, a portal to ridiculous and radical questions has been discovered: Do the creative thoughts that enter our minds belong to us or are they a flock of someone else's ideas? How much of what we hear and consume do we emit back into the world? Where does inspiration and productivity come from? Is it possible to listen without being affected? Does listening involve a space? What does sound look like? How are sound's images transmitted to others?

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SUBMITTED IMAGES

‘Telepathic Drawing Session’ is a performance project that explores how messages are transmitted and received. Sackville-based artist Leah Garnett, of Mount Allison University, is organizing the event,

Garnett is a professor at Mount Allison University, where she teaches drawing, open media and contemporary art issues, as well as the host of Drawings on Air, in which she asks listeners to picture the images she constructs through her verbal descriptions.

"I didn't grow up with a television and my access point to the world was through the radio. I was welcomed to imagine for myself, instead of having images supplied to me on the screen. I have developed a personal and a visual relationship with the radio, as I have imagined the visuals as they were transmitted to me," says Garnett.

This weekend, Garnett's skills of transmission are being tested as she participates in the innovative performance project between Struts Gallery in Sackville and Articule in Montreal, where two other artists - Jon Knowles and Donna Akrey - and curator Rebecca Duclos are stationed to execute drawings on large transparent sheets of Mylar attached to the windows of the gallery.

Duclos will be timekeeper as Akrey telepathically communicates her six different drawings to Garnett who will then broadcast the received transmissions on air back to Knowles.

Knowles' role is to interpret, through drawing, Akrey's original idea as he hears Garnett's instructions, which will be streamed online as well as broadcast to the live audience at Articule.

According to Garnett, the acts of transmission and reception are happening continually during the cyclical communication between viewers and listeners.

Perhaps art is a metaphor of an individual subconscious based on the collective consciousness? Although neither Garnett nor I want to reduce art to a metaphor.

Art is, however, a way of communicating. Besides drawing, the radio constitutes an artistic practice for Garnett who describes it as a disembodied art form as she sends her voice out into space.

"I collect people's thoughts and transmit them around space. I am interested in the physicality of this shared space and such interest arises from my previous investigations into electromagnetic spectrum and outer space while I was a student at NSCAD."

Garnett's academic approach to the science of how the radio works is balanced with the artist's playful approach found in the storytelling and improvisational elements of Telepathic Drawing Session.

These four participants are eager to test their experiment on a greater scale as they muse the possibility of entering the 2010 World Telekinesis Championships to be held in Washington this June by a trio of West-Coast artists called Noxious Sector.

Instead of transmitting and receiving images with a black marker on top of a window, Garnett and her team will explore their telepathic and telekinetic abilities in a mission to influence a candle. Instead of drawings executed according to the force of sent and received directions, a trophy is at stake.

So how is telepathy possible in the case of sound transmitting and art-making?

For Garnett, who poetically states that "thought is a form of energy that moves out in waves," understanding the potential physicality of an idea and how it moves from us, by the means of telepathy, is behind the driving force of her unsatisfied curiosity. She is not ashamed to declare that forces of magic are at play, as are science and an open mind.

As much as Garnett would like to have all the answers behind how telepathy works for her three collaborators in Montreal, she is quick to change her mind as she states, "We don't really need to know how it works. I'd like to think that telepathy collapses space and exists where the realms of physicality and thought meet."

Ola Wlusek is an independent curator and writer of visual art based in Southern Ontario. She can be reached at olawlusek@hotmail.com.