Portraits as Portals: Psychic Mediums Read Unknown Artists

Jennifer Fisher & Jim Drobnick, Reading for an Unknown Artist through “Portrait of a Young Gentleman,” 2024, unattributed portrait (c.1655-1660), oil on canvas, collection of Art Windsor-Essex, high-res colour video, 17:02 minute cycle of 4 readings. Psychic medium depicted: Miss AJ Williams. Photo: DisplayCult.

Portraits as Portals: Psychic Mediums Read Unknown Artists

A Project by Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick
July 18 to October 20, 2024
Art Windsor-Essex

What can be known about artists whose names have been lost to history? The DisplayCult collaborative has invited professional mediums to undertake psychic readings of often-overlooked portraits by “unknown artists” in public art collections since 2018. No details about the works were provided to the readers in advance. During the sessions, mediums were asked to look through the eyes of the portrait’s subject to receive impressions about the unknown artist. The portrait thus becomes a portal through which the psychic channels resonant details about the artist’s life, manner of working, personal relationships, and position within the social scene.

At Art Windsor-Essex, Portraits as Portals configures seven video installations featuring mediums reading unattributed portraits, four from the Gallery’s collection. Much in the same way that psychic mediums work with police departments to locate missing people, this project tests the use of paranormal perception as a method for art-historical investigation. While some readings offer potentially verifiable details, more often they operate on an affective level: transmitting energies and feelings about the artists’ emotional states and motivations, the mood of the era, and the atmosphere of the setting’s context. The different readings overlap and differ in intriguing ways, even at times aligning with what is suggested by current art-historical scholarship.

Jennifer Fisher & Jim Drobnick, Reading for an Unknown Artist through “Gentleman with Feather Quill Pen,” 2024, unattributed portrait (c. 1850), oil on canvas, collection of DisplayCult, high-res colour video, 35:16 minute cycle of 6 readings. Psychic medium depicted: Richard Ravenhawke. Photo: DisplayCult.

The videotaped sessions also present compelling performances of psychic mediumship. They show intuition as an embodied practice as the readers receive and articulate the subtle impressions they discern through the paintings. Each reading reveals a fascinating flow of mediumistic bearing, gestures and pauses as the psychics see, hear, feel and even smell aspects of the artists’ lives.

The practices of channeling documented in this project reflect Spiritualism’s longstanding influence on the conventions of art viewing. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was Spiritualists working in museum education who initiated the exercise of attuning to original works of art as a secular meditation. Communing with artworks through this kind of mediumistic viewing, where the presence of artworks energetically implicates the beholder, continues in museums today and remains integral to aesthetic experience.

Our heartfelt thanks go to AWE for supporting the exhibition. We are deeply grateful to Renée Lear for her brilliant videography, video editing and ongoing commitment to the project, and to Hailey Kobrin for impeccable production assistance. We profoundly appreciate the openness of the psychic mediums identified through this research for contributing their extraordinary gifts. Finally, we thank the Spirit artists who came through during the readings for their gracious collaboration.

– Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick

Jennifer Fisher & Jim Drobnick, Reading for an Unknown Artist through “Soldier Portrait,” 2024, unattributed portrait (c.1750-1770), oil on metal plate, collection of DisplayCult, high-res colour video, 37:59 minute cycle of 5 readings. Psychic medium depicted: Jen Maramba. Photo: DisplayCult.

Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick comprise the curatorial collaborative DisplayCult, which aspires to creatively merge disciplines, media and communities in order to propose generative prototypes for display and aesthetic engagement. Their exhibitions include Portraits as Portals (Art Windsor-Essex and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre), Archives by Artists (Galerie UQO and the Archives of Ontario), NIGHTSENSE (Nuit Blanche, Toronto), MetroSonics (National Gallery of Canada Library), Odor Limits (Esther M. Klein Art Gallery), Listening Awry (McMaster Museum of Art), Aural Cultures (Walter Phillips Gallery), Linda Montano (Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts), reminiSCENT (FADO), Museopathy (Agnes Etherington Art Centre), Vital Signs (Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery) and CounterPoses (Oboro), among others. Their collaborative publications include co-founding and serving as joint-editors for the Journal of Curatorial Studies, as well as co-writing texts for Turba, Public, Sound Affects, Muséologies, and The Artist as Curator. www.displaycult.com

As Professor of Contemporary Art and Curatorial Studies at York University, Fisher’s research focuses on exhibition practices, affect theory, and the aesthetics of the non-visual senses. Her essays on paranormal art epistemologies have appeared in Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affective Inquiry, The Ashgate Companion to Paranormal Cultures and The Senses & Society. She is the editor of the anthology Technologies of Intuition. As Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at OCAD University, Jim Drobnick’s research investigates post-media practices in the visual arts, specializing in performance, the senses (particularly smell and sound) and artists’ multiples. His writings appear in anthologies such as Olfactory Art and the Political in the Age of Resistance, Designing with Smell, and Food and Museums. His books include the anthologies Aural Cultures and The Smell Culture Reader.

Jennifer Fisher & Jim Drobnick, Portraits as Portals: Psychic Mediums Read Unknown Artists, installation view, Art Windsor-Essex. Photo: Justin Elliott.

The production of the videos for this exhibition was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the School of Art, Media, Performance and Design at York University, and the Faculty of Arts and Science at OCAD University.

Contact:
Jennifer Fisher: jefish@yorku.ca

Art Windsor-Essex
401 Riverside Drive
Windsor, Ontario N9A 7J1
Portraits as Portals can be found on the 3rd Floor behind the black curtain.
www.artwindsoressex.ca

Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10am-5pm; Sunday 11am-5pm
Admission: free to members; $10 CAN to non-members

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