Look at this amazing presentation Alexis Konwinsky from Dominican University made about her experience as a Mental Filmness jury member!! I have to admit, I was pretty bowled over by this. The fact that this experience was so meaningful to someone who has helped us so much is incredibly rewarding. I also love the idea of “cinema therapy”—I’ve always felt that watching the films helps me connect to others and understand my own mental health struggles. It truly is a form of therapy for me.
Thank you Alexis, we appreciate you and all of our jury members. We could use some more and I’ll be putting out a call soon—please e-mail sharon@mentalfilmness.com if interested. Happy to give student or community service credit if it is approved, and to give recommendation letters.
We have an exciting announcement about our next library screening!
On Saturday, June 1st, at 1:00 p.m. we will host the local filmmaker Cortez Mack at the Douglass Branch as he screens his three short films about mental health and healing in the black community.
Program:
– “Bobby,” a short film about dementia and mental health awareness. – “Dinner Table,” a short film about the disconnection of the family. – “Splitting Image,” a short film about a father-son relationship.
The films will be followed by a discussion with Cortez Mack.
This program is proudly presented by the African American Heritage Committee of the Chicago Public Library and by Mental Filmness, a Chicago-based film festival about mental health.
In an effort to show the work of more filmmakers who would like to screen live and speak about their films, and also in an effort to feature more programs throughout the year to continue to build and engage an audience, Mental Filmness is trying to present some more one-off programs in addition to the annual October festival. The Secrets Women Keep screening and performance on 4/6 was one such event.
Mental Filmness has continued to partner with the Chicago Public Library to host some of these screenings. This time the event was co-sponsored by the library’s Diversability and Women’s History Committees, and held at the Independence Branch Library.
Jessica Mathis (aka Divinity Rose) is a powerful advocate and multi-disciplinary artist whose collection of animated shorts Triggered garnered enough audience votes to land it the Realism Award in last year’s virtual festival. She is obviously passionate about speaking live when able to do so and visited to screen and engage in discussion about the film. Triggered is an animated collection of true recorded stories of women living with post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition most commonly associated with veterans. Each woman tells her personal story, including how the trauma developed, their triggers, and their coping mechanisms. Despite the heavy subject matter, the animations, music, and narrative choice to end on a note of survival and healing in each story overall make the film experience ultimately cathartic and hopeful.
Jessica has been working with the rising young comedienne Mandee McKelvey, so we were lucky enough to have Mandee on hand as well to give a performance as they were coming through town. Mandee does an incredible act on women’s body autonomy based on her personal experiences that is as informative and moving as it is hilarious. For Mandee’s library visit she performed part of her act that is more like a theatrical piece of storytelling, an unusual story about her irregular breast growth and how it impacted her adolescence and continues to impact her today after surgery. She has sometimes called this story “My Left Boob.” It went over very well, eliciting not only laughter, but women opening up afterward to tell their own stories about gender bias they’ve encountered in the medical field.
Jessica also showed a film from another emerging regional artist called Shane Devon. The short film, called iSwap, tells the story of young adults who can swap their bodies using a pair of glasses at a party for three hours. The body swap, which begins as a game and a prank, elicits a confession from one participant to his best friend that he felt like he was supposed to have been born into a girl’s body, and ends on the poignant note of her acceptance and support. I did not realize that we were the first audience treated to the premiere of this film, or that the filmmaker Shane Devon had recently identified and come out as transgender, both of which made it all the more special.
While I always wish there was a bit more of an audience for these events, I have to admit our audiences are the absolute best audiences. They are always attentive, empathetic, and insightful, so we must be doing something right. The discussion engaged in afterward had the majority-female audience opening up in a candid and vulnerable way about their own experiences and asking smart questions as usual. I was a little worried since this show contained some more mature content and controversial material that we might upset someone but the tenor of the conversation was always calm, intelligent, and respectful. Jessica and Mandee were also incredibly generous with their time. I know they both had shows and other pursuits this weekend but they stayed after their allotted time to answer questions, engage in discussion, and validate and connect with audience members. These two are the real deal, there for the real issues.
We call it the “secrets women keep” because the whole show was about issues women experience that they don’t talk about—because they’re ashamed, because they’re not validated, because they’re not believed. We got to talk about these issues on this one special day, but we need to try to keep talking about and spreading awareness of them. Check out triggerstories.com for the award-winning short by Jessica Mathis (aka Divinity Rose) and Onemandeeshow.com (acclaimed comedienne Mandee McKelvey) for more.
Gifts Of Madness – Part III – The day after the exhibit was actually just as lovely and dear to me as the day of. It was the day I got to spend a little more time with Kagan Goh. I thought he would be too busy with his multiple projects at the Ignite The Arts festival, but Kagan really takes time for everyone. We met at the gallery and his delightful friend Tricia Beatrice Ryan was there as well, who was also a featured Gifts Of Madness artist. No small talk, we delved right into a conversation about mental health, empathy, and our works as artists. Though still a little chilly, this was a beautiful day for the scenery. The sun had come out and unlike the former day that was a bit overcast, the water looked just as blue as it did on the travel websites I saw. It was amazing to me that it actually looked that way!
We were all in good spirits due to the sunshine and the honor of being a part of the Gifts Of Madness, something that was very meaningful to all of us. I remember as we were walking to a little cafe to get coffee, we started singing the Sesame Street song “Sunny days,” except no one could seem to remember the whole thing.
We went to an adorable beachside cafe and Kagan treated me and Tricia to coffee and an apple strudel. This was hands down the best apple strudel I have ever had in my life, with real apple slices inside and whipped cream on top! We sat out in the sunshine on the beach where I snapped some photos of the beauty of the blue water and continued to have some deep conversations about our art, our dark periods, and our life’s meaning and purpose.
I thought another reason that would make the trip worth it was just meeting Kagan in person, like traveling a distance to meet a Buddhist monk with Zen wisdom, and it was actually true. He is 100 percent the real thing, devoting his life to mental health advocacy both through helping people struggling and through his multi-disciplinary art, and he does not slow down. He told me once again how much he appreciated Mental Filmness and the festival screening the world premiere of his short film The Day My Cat Saved My Life. He continued to tell me every single thing he liked about it, from the diversity to the way it supported emerging artists like he did. He has been one of its biggest fans and supporters. He gifted me his poetry chapbook. The terrible disease of bipolar disorder may have brought us together but our persistence and love of art is what really cemented our bond.
I had another couple of my classic misadventures that evening when I realized that while my Internet connection worked my phone network wouldn’t work, and I needed to check out of my motel and call a cab to pick me up, so I had to look at who was online and “phone a friend” through Facebook Messenger to help with my flakiness, and all I can say is I’m lucky to have a great support system. These are just the kind of practical things I don’t think of, that my phone wouldn’t work in Canada.
However, I also finished my mental health art journey at Sociale, the restaurant next door to my motel, with a decadent dinner of prawns and crab. Just as good or better than the food was the view as I watched the sunset over the Lake Okanagan beach. It’s funny, I could see the man at the table next to me doing the same thing, just gazing at the window, and the waitress even asked me if I wanted to stay longer for the view as the sun was setting, but I had to go catch my flight.
Some people say that with travel you pay for memories and experiences rather than possessions, and those feel more important to me. I will always remember that morning by the lake with these people I bonded with over art and mental health, sipping our coffee and sharing our experiences. I think Kagan even said something about how you can’t take your possessions with you, but these memories you make are priceless.
Gifts Of Madness – Part II – After my arrival I dashed over to check into the Kettle Beach Motel and get more dressed up for the exhibit opening in a few hours. There’s a cute little strip of old-fashioned beach resorts and motels along Lake Okanagan that are all fairly cheap.
It was walking distance to the gallery so I headed over to the opening at 7 p.m. I was incredibly anxious but it was such a special evening and so worth it. First of all, the exhibit was *very* well-attended, there was actually a line waiting to get in. I got to meet the gallery owner Paul Crawford and both Paul and Kagan gave moving speeches about the importance of recognizing mental health issues in the community and funding mental health resources. They both gave me a shout-out by name as having come all the way from Chicago to attend!
There were quite a few people looking at my art and some recognized me from my photo. I saw a couple of people engaged in conversation about it and though it felt awkward I made a joke like “Isn’t it amazing?” LOL and we talked about it. Everyone seemed to like the snowy day painting the best, which is interesting because I felt it was the most rough and loose, and the one I spent the least time on. The woman I was chatting to pointed out how she liked that there was just a little bit of color in the lights among all the snow that gave it a sense of hope. I talked to these appreciative folks for awhile and they were the ones who ended up snapping these photos of me a little more dressed up for the special night. After it was pointed out that I was from Chicago several people came to talk to me too, and some took my business card. I got quite a bit of appreciation and one attendee even said I was her favorite artist!
Julia introduced me to an artist who had a short film piece in the gallery, who wants to submit to Mental Filmness. We really bonded and she made me feel so much better because she had traveled from Ontario and had a very similar experience to mine. I told her I hadn’t flown since 2018 and it was a bit nerve-wracking with everyone being rushed along and airport staff being brusque, and she told me she hadn’t traveled since 2018 either and felt the same, and like everyone already expected you to know what to do. I also told her that it was stressful because the customs agent grilled me about why I would come from Chicago to spend only two days in Canada, and when I told him it was for an art exhibit it was like he didn’t believe me and looked at all my papers. He asked if I was required to come or being paid and I said no, but I really wanted to come. It made me feel kind of shitty, like being in an art exhibit wasn’t a valid reason to travel to Canada. She empathized with me and said that was just the way customs in Canada usually is, very suspicious and it was almost like they were upset they didn’t get the chance to interrogate her when she was just going home, LOL. Our talk made me feel so much better and less incompetent and I really hope she submits her film to the festival.
When I was walking back to my motel of course I got lost, which I have no idea how I could even do because it’s basically one turn but it was dark this time, but a kindly pedestrian steered me in the right direction and I made it back exhausted but fulfilled.
[Background: I had the great honor of having my art selected for the Gifts Of Madness exhibit at the Penticton Art Gallery. The exhibit was curated by the renowned Kagan Goh, affectionately known as the “bipolar laureate” of Vancouver, whose short film The Day My Cat Saved My Life had its world premiere at Mental Filmness. The exhibit was a celebration of Mad Pride, a movement that encourages those who struggle with mental health to embrace not only its challenges but the gifts of creative and expressive gifts it often brings, creating a holistic and de-stigmatizing picture. I was so honored, in fact, that I decided to attempt to pull off the truly mad stunt of traveling from Chicago to Pentiction in one weekend to be at the exhibit opening, which I somehow managed to do, with some pratfalls along the way.]
Gifts Of Madness – Part I – OK, from now on, I have to make more detailed itineraries and plans. This trip was kind of last-minute and on a whim and I forgot *everything*, I really mean everything. My passport and phone at first, my toothbrush and brush somehow, and even some of my clothes. I have no idea how I managed to do that with so little packing to do, except I was terrified and overwhelmed and almost paralyzed.
Because of my blunders I missed my flight and with international flights that don’t run frequently that meant I had to get to Penticton the next day, which was a huge bummer of course. I was sad and frustrated and about to give up, but I kept thinking, how many chances like this do you get in a lifetime? and pushed through.
Also, the buses don’t run on the weekends in Penticton, so I took a cab straight to the Penticton Art Gallery. This was when I began to forget my travel troubles a bit as I looked out the window at the beautiful rolling mountains and trees. Our cab had to stop for 20 minutes because we were at the site of a landslide (?) so that threw another hurdle in my way. When I arrived, though, I immediately knew that everything was worth it.
I finally got to meet Kagan Goh and his lovely wife Julia in person and look around at the amazing exhibit. I have never been in an exhibit of this scope and scale. There were over 100 artists showing with a few pieces of work in a diverse array of styles that reflected a theme of mental health. Kagan said that he put out a call for work on the theme rather than seeking out established artists because he wanted to give “emerging artists” (like myself) a chance to exhibit, which reminds me a lot of what I try to do with Mental Filmness.
And then I saw my exhibit and it just blew my mind. There was nothing different about it really except that my landscapes were hung together within that context, but I can’t describe how truly special it felt for them to be there. I was also quite moved that they included my entire lengthy biography and artist’s statement next to my work. Julia was kind enough to offer to snap a few pics of me next to it when I was still a little frazzled. You can spend hours of painting in solitude, and these moments of validation and recognition are what make it worth it. And now I can truly say that my art has gone international!
I never considered myself a huge fan of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love, though it has numerous huge fans. The fidgety, blue-suited central character Barry Egan, played by an unforgettably vulnerable Adam Sandler, obviously has a lot of people identifying with and rooting for self-loathing loners, and I can only encourage that behavior. I think for me the most problematic aspects of the film were that it came across as one of those “love will solve all your emotional problems” romantic comedies, combined with the fact that Barry is a character that seems like he has some fairly serious psychological problems—to the point where he impulsively inflicts property damage in a fit of rage a few times– that the film treats a bit lightly and sometimes even humorously.
That being said, I think even on a first viewing it’s apparent that this movie is not meant to be literal and real, but rather heightened and stylized. Plot elements like the mysterious phone sex line operators tracking down and harassing the hapless Barry seem a little…surreal? Pynchon-esque? Not to mention the way the movie opens––with a random car crash and a perfectly good harmonium left out on the street.
Here was my eventual insight into Punch Drunk Love: I feel like it’s more about Barry’s feelings and self-actualization than it is about anything else, including even romantic love. If you look at it that way, the fantastic elements in the movie represent different forces Barry must contend with in his life to embrace his own identity. The sinister presence behind the phone sex line Barry calls in a moment of desperate loneliness represents Barry’s inner negative inner voices, compulsion, and disconnection. Alternately, Emily Watson’s soft, ethereal Lena represents unconditional love. She loved Barry seeing him in a photo before she knew him, and she continues to love him no matter what odd or even disturbing things he does (like smashing up a bathroom) or says (appearing breathless at her door confessing that he called the phone sex line, but he’s going to make it up to her by redeeming his pudding coupons for free mileage).
Barry may still be a bumbling, awkward presence at the end of the film, but he’s taken a journey of growth. He’s told off and stood up to his controlling sisters. By flying to Hawaii to visit Lena, not only did Barry decide to go spontaneously, but he didn’t even let the fact that he couldn’t rely on his obsessive plan to redeem pudding coupons for mileage stop him. Lena also tells Barry, as they sit on the beach in the twilight, that she’s so happy he got her out of her room. The metaphor is fairly obvious in that these are two lonely people trapped in their hermetically sealed universes who desperately want some force to give them an excuse to break out. Still, they move shyly and tentatively throughout their encounters, with some fear of what happens next. I recently heard someone describe this movie as being about the tension between wanting to be loved and not wanting to be seen by other people, which I thought was quite lovely and highly accurate.
I love that the movie doesn’t just let Barry and Lena have a happy ending, either. Those malicious impulses Barry set into force earlier have come to chase him down, literally, crashing into his car and hurting Lena. Barry’s demons don’t want him to get away with his happiness, which reinforces my feeling that these villains actually represent Barry’s darkest intrusive thoughts about himself, his self-loathing, and his shame about his past. These relentless pursuers are part of Barry’s quest as he must not only vanquish the henchmen but also go after their overlord—who is hilariously played by the indefatigable Phillip Seymour Hoffman and mysteriously based out of a mattress store in Provo, Utah. It is only after Barry asserts to the enemies of his peace and well-being that he is going to let this love in into his life and let it give him strength that he ends up getting the girl, which quells some of my earlier concerns that Barry had a lot of therapeutic work to do before embarking on a relationship.
When I watched this film in the past, I was skeptical of Lena’s romantic interest in Barry. Given that Barry acts like an emotionally stunted child a good deal of the time, I felt that perhaps Lena’s interest came from a place of feeling sorry for him or having a savior complex rather than from a place of having any genuine interest in and connection with him. What I had forgotten is that Lena is fairly awkward herself, from her first fumbling scenes in the film’s opening to her not being able to summon the courage to kiss Barry. I’m not even sure if Lena is real. Some fans of the film have hypothesized that Lena is an alien, due to the sudden and unexplained crash preceding her arrival in the beginning, the lens flares and light often surrounding her, and the fact that she has no family and is always in the air. What Lena definitely represents is unconditional love, which many people argue also does not exist. Lena is a benevolent embodiment of unconditional love in its purest, most distilled form—of the ability to accept ourselves, forgive ourselves, love ourselves, and think we are worthy of love and letting love into our lives.
I’ve always known that this movie was really a fantasy, and not just in the improbable way that most romantic comedies are. It’s a fantasy almost in the way hero’s journeys are, with their knights, dragons, and princesses—the dragons just happen to be aggressive phone sex line operators. It’s a fantasy in the lush colors of its cinematography, the dramatic play between high tension and indulgent romantic symphony in the quirky score, the dreamlike elements that are broken up by color-banded interstitials across the screen, like the signal is being lost and then found again. What never occurred to me was I feel like it’s just as much (or more of) a love story about self-actualization than it is about romantic love.
Yayayay!! Oh, happy day, my work has been accepted into the Gifts of Madness exhibit!
“GIFTS OF MADNESS transcends the boundaries of a traditional art exhibition; it is a celebration of Mad Pride, a movement that fearlessly embraces the challenges of mental health,” said festival organizers in a press release this week.
“Curated by the renowned Kagan Goh, the exhibition endeavors to illuminate the multifaceted nature of the mental health experience, navigating the spectrum from negative to positive and exploring all shades in between.”
I am immensely proud to have been chosen for this exhibit about the challenges and gifts of living with mental illness, which is one of the most massive in scope and vision of such themed exhibits I have ever heard of.
Thank you Kagan Goh for curating this and inviting me to apply, and for your continued support over the years since you featured your own work in Mental Filmness.
As some may have noted, this exhibit is in Vancouver. I am looking into the feasibility of traveling there myself—I am going to try my hardest to make it happen, especially since it looks beautiful there, but at any rate I am quite proud of this accomplishment and having these paintings seen in such a festival.
When I was in my twenties, I lived for a short time in D.C. with my then-fiance, who worked the night shift. I made a little over $20k/yr at the time working as a proofreader in Falls Church, where I commuted by bus every day. I had very little money to my name, not a friend to speak of there, and lived in a depressing high-rise with roaches. There was, however, one redeeming thing about it: it had a public library right across the street.
It was a small library branch, but I still ended up taking home armloads of books every week. I read a lot of the classics. I can remember getting home from work and spending hours at night reading Ulysses side-by-side with a reading guide, reading Don Quixote, Thomas Pynchon, all the big, difficult books. I’ve always had the ability to read for sustained periods of time without ever tiring of it, I guess it’s no wonder I became a librarian. I also remember reading this book.
Lanark immediately stood out to me as being authored by a singular voice. To this day, it is one of the most unique books I’ve ever read, and among my favorites. This signed, limited edition I have that some of my dear friends surprised me with as a gift is one of my most prized possessions. He did all the illustrations and it’s beautiful.
The “four books” thing is kind of a gimmick; the book isn’t very long, but it’s *epic*. It’s difficult to describe how seamlessly Alasdair Gray blends the surreal elements in the story with coming of age and trying to find your purpose as an artist in a society you don’t even want to understand.
I finally saw Poor Things, which is an adaptation of another Alasdair Gray novel, this weekend. I love the director Yorgos Lanthimos, who has similarly used sci-fi elements to explore mysteries of the human condition like family and couplehood.
I feel like Alasdair Gray and Yorgos Lanthimos are a perfect mesh of style and substance. This film is everything I love about both of them: a sort of epic bildungsroman replete with dazzling set design and costumes at every turn, richly imagined fantastic details and surprising dark humor, but still ultimately about finding your identity in a baffling universe that tries to stifle your voice at every turn. There’s no doubt that Emma Stone’s captivating performance absolutely carried this film. If it was someone any less committed to it, any less capable of delivering her absurdist lines with the pitch-perfect blend of naivete and evolving selfhood, less capable of speaking her own original language in its self-contained universe, even with the film’s visual mastery and its high concept, it could have faltered.
There was a line she delivered toward the end of the movie, to the man she calls “God” her creator, about how she was beginning to become fascinated by this life he had given her. It struck me that the whole film could be read as a metaphor for life itself: despite Bella’s unusual circumstances, we all have to try to come to that reckoning with our own lives, about what fascinates us, through exploration and experience. I had a thought once about the title “It’s A Wonderful Life,” and how I feel like that’s such an apt title—it’s not a perfect life, it’s maybe not even a good life—but it’s certainly full of wonder, of curiosity, of fascination.
