Professor Jennifer Fisher from York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD), in collaboration with co-curator Jim Drobnick of OCAD University, recently opened a new exhibition entitled Portraits as Portals: Psychic Mediums Read an Unknown Artist at the Archives of Ontario.
This innovative installation centres around a 19th century painting, by an artist whose name is currently unknown, from the art collection of the Government of Ontario. Fisher and Drobnick worked with professional psychic mediums to uncover details about the artist’s life and context. Much in the same way that psychic mediums work with police departments to locate missing people, this research-creation project tests the use of paranormal perception as a method of art-historical investigation.
Seated in period chairs, visitors can watch a cycle of five videotaped sessions where the medium is invited to “look out through the eyes of the portrait’s subject” to receive impressions about the artist’s life, their manner of working, personal relationships and position within the artistic milieu.
While some readings offer potentially verifiable facts, more often they relate compelling details about the mood of the era, the artist’s motivations and state of mind, and the atmosphere of the setting’s context. Through this process the portrait becomes a “portal,” allowing the mediums to convey insights about the artist that have been lost to art history. The psychic readings overlap and differ in intriguing ways, sometimes aligning with what is suggested by current scholarship.
The practices of channeling documented in this project reflect Spiritualism’s longstanding influence on conventions of art viewing. Each reading reveals a fascinating flow of the medium’s posture, gesture and pauses as they see, hear, feel and even smell aspects of the artist’s life.
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 mode of secular meditation. Communing with artworks through this kind of mediumistic viewing, where the presence of original artworks energetically implicates the beholder, continues in museums today and remains integral to aesthetic experience.
The recorded sessions also showcase the talents of the psychic mediums. They demonstrate how the mediums use their intuition to interpret and express the subtle messages they receive from the painting.
Watching these readings, you can see how they use body language, gestures and pauses as they describe what they see, hear, feel and even smell aspects of the artist’s life.
Portraits as Portals at the Archives of Ontario is one of several exhibitions stemming from Fisher and Drobnick’s research-creation project, The Medium in the Museum. The exhibition will continue at the Archives of Ontario until March 31, 2025.
Production was supported by the Social Science 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.
For more information about Portraits as Portals and Artists’ Tarot and the Archive, visit the Archives of Ontario’s official website.