Meta-pictures of Mental Illness

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Abstract

Mental illness is an inner experience that continues to be viewed with fear and suspicion by others. I would like to examine images that attempt to represent or make salient a qualitative sense of such elusive abstract states, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. As image makers, we continue to deploy clichés as equivalencies for the disordered mind, including: spatial fragmentation, histrionic, hermeneutical overload, romanticized portraits of anguish or conversely, vacancy. Many other researchers have noted the plethora of such representational stereotypes, and I am not per-se concerned with the dismantling of such representations, but rather, with why it is that we are left with such inadequate images or so called “tired significations” of such a deeply human phenomenon. The sort of images I would like to specifically focus upon are those that demonstrate, even enact in a meta-pictorial way, an awareness of their own inherent pictorial inadequacy.