– ART & AUTISM –

To have autism is often to be surprised by life. I am amused by my child’s awe at quotidian things—colorful beads, playdough, a bubble bath, the visible tentacles on a plate of calamari. I’m envious of his ability to attain something I often can’t: a state of transcendence induced by art. That might sound like an overstatement, but most adults I see in museums today can’t go seven seconds without reaching for their cell phones. Every kid is weird in his or her own way, those with autism maybe even more so. He is much more so. He lies on the floor and looks at exhibitions for long periods of time. He immerses himself. He’s an aesthete.

Along with instruction in tooth brushing or washing dishes, parents hope to pass along their passions, their politics, and their taste to their children. I want to pass on to my son a love of books, music, and art. I accept that this is partly about the gratification of my own ego, but it’s also one of the only ways I know of making a rich life. That’s what we all want for our progeny. I have read to him since he was in utero, I played the music I wanted him to like, (Eminem, Chopin, Nina Simone, Amy Winehouse and Tchaikovsky); and have toted him around to art museums his entire life. I am happy now as Managing Director of the Multicultural Heritage Centre that we can come alone after hours and he can lie on the floor and see art at his angle and in his way, and in his own time.
Of course, your kids might reject what you offer them. Good boy that he is, he humors me. He loves art.  Art, in many of its forms, seems to move him in some way. I have come to realize that visual culture: how we see, what we see, and what we make of it, is forever changing, I realized that visiting museums with my child has changed how I see art.
Of course, autism has affected most aspects of my life. Sometimes this change is profound. Sometimes it is simply a matter of logistics, like eating in restaurants less frequently and sleeping less.  Where once I might have spent hours in a museum, I now spend minutes. But that itself is a profound change—a mode of parental efficiency, like folding laundry while also reading a bedtime story, which becomes a different way of seeing. The imperative to spend less time engaged with art, means I judge more quickly which piece in a gallery to which I give my attention. Much as I accept that some mornings, I can’t make the beds and breakfast, I accept that I can’t look at everything in an exhibition. It has been helpful to learn that engagement with art doesn’t necessitate engaging with every piece of it—that just as my child gets tired, so, too, do my eyes.
I think it was Berger who said, “The child looks and recognizes before it can speak”. He has no language, but Art moves him in unspeakable ways. Unlike me, my child is considerably more engaged by the representative. My taste runs much more toward realism.  I need to know the intent, I labour over the artist statement for meaning. I recently recall that “The Buffalo Corral” by Heather Shillinglaw was a big hit with him. He could lie inside the panels and be surrounded by art and color and texture, the scale, the sheer variety of visual stimulus. Encountering such work feels like a process to experience. He was enthralled. He feels art.

Art is a private matter. I only want him to understand that art is a question being asked of us, that there is no correct response, and that anyone can answer.

Please come visit The Multicultural Public Art Gallery, open winter hours 10-4 Tues-Sat.  If you would like special accommodation to come after hours, please call me Melissa Hartley, Managing Director 780-963-2777.

Heather Shillinglaw

“Buffalo Corral”

This installation artwork called ‘Buffalo Corral’ is by Metis artist Heather Shillinglaw. The panorama image of an industrial landscape is created by interconnected doors to form a corral within the gallery, inside this corral the artist has rendered an alternative forest landscape populated by Metis and Cree individuals whom have influenced Heather and her creative process. This complex personal narrative portrayed within the corral is starkly juxtaposed against the polluted environment which surrounds the forest oasis, asking viewers to consider the impact we have on history and on our environment.

Read more about Heather Shillinglaw’s art at the Multicultural Heritage Center on Alberta Native News by clicking here. 

IMAGE CREDIT: Heather Shillinglaw

Artists Statement

Buffalo Corral is a panorama made out of doors with 360-degree perspective of landmark our industrial refinery row 1850’s translated in a my own romantic perspective of using beadwork and my research of historical painters that painted the Metis, located in the Museum de Beau Arts, Ontario Gallery of Art and the Chicago Institute. The time period of the Romantic era the artist of the day I studied in galleries Paris, and Germany and also the first Panorama in Austria. The drama in the awe of nature the romantics translated in many mediums I aspire by collaging metis traditions in beadwork based on my own interpretation of beading techniques then I inspired by the historical paintings to modernize the Metis and Cree heroes today Metis community they are poets, painters, politicians and writers, historians, scholars and our youth with my family.