JUNE GUTMAN

    I am a 27 year old Jewish woman born and raised in Montreal. I am fixated on producing tangible evidence of my experience of reality. My acute awareness of my own existence has been present throughout my life; I have remained in awe of and shocked by my own consciousness since childhood.

    By age 12, my sensitivity to life resulted in a quick admittance to the psychiatric world and I spent my formative years as a mental patient. I am now in the process of ridding my system of the harmful medication I took for most of my life, trying to free myself from the confinement of diagnosis and re-learning who I am without the medicalized opinion of the so-called professionals.

Artist statement:
   
    While I fight to withdraw from medication I took since childhood, I am presented with many seemingly unmanageable symptoms, one of which I name "The Terror". Much of my art is in response to this nightmarish state; I am desperate for relief and I ache for an accurate documentation of this unfathomable condition.
   
    Beyond “The Terror”, I live with many other experiences that dodge words; many bizarre, borderline-psychedelic and sometimes mystical moments that fall into the category of "Unreality".

    My psyche is rearranging itself as I suffer and heal from years of adhering to the "mentally-ill" narrative, being over-medicated and only knowing darkness; my art is an attempt at detailing this life in images. Simultaneously, my art is a comment on the opaqueness, the privacy, the secrecy and the hidden nature of the individual mind.

    My attempt to educate an audience on psychiatric-harm is very important to me. I am far from alone in my experience as a psychiatric-survivor and through my art, I am also fighting for those whose lives have been stolen by psychiatry.