Lauren Tenney

Artist Statement

Painting is something that I love to do. The act of painting helps me process how I perceive the world. I am a psychiatric survivor. I am a voice hearer and vision see-er. Seeker? I am not sure I would be alive if I did not have the benefit of playing around with paint. The privilege to paint is not a freedom experienced by many people who are psychiatrized. My art for me is to heal. My art for you is to give an opportunity to know the kinds of human rights violations that are being perpetrated by psychiatry on people of all ages. I have made dozens of paintings and all start with the same squiggle pattern I have made since I was in the third grade. . . Sometimes I will paint a base and then the pattern, sometimes I will paint the pattern and then cover it entirely. There is something comforting about the repetitive movement, and the feel of the brush or pen taking its own command. Painting for me sometimes is a healing process. Sometimes painting is a way to kill time. I know this is going to upset you, but the truth is that often painting for me does not have any point at all except to see what will come out of the process. With only one or two exceptions, paintings I make are not planned. It is an emergent process that I am as surprised by as the viewer. A goal of my art for the watcher, if I had a goal, which I am not sure I do, is for the watcher to pick up a brush and think they could do as well or better as the images I produce, and then to wonder if they could just let what is inside of them out. Mental patient or painter? Schizoaffective or spiritualist? My goal is to challenge the proscribed social measures and the prescribed medicators. To challenge social control. I wish my art does this for you. My wish is for you to see what emerges between the lines, in the shadows, where the faces come. Who is there, trying to get into this world as I try to get out of this world? I listen for clues as to which brush to use, which color? I wait for the intervention, the one hardest for me to hear, stop! Put down the brush. Not another . . . and in that second, yes, the brush went too far, the shadow is lost, and the painting has again morphed. I love taking work-in-progress photos and making videos of how the paintings emerge. In relation to House of Shadows call for "Hallucinations and Medications" as a voice hearer, as a psychiatric survivor, as a human rights demander and defender, answering this call was the only right thing to do. I do believe that through art we can protect human rights and change the world. Stop forced psychiatry. Let people hallucinate. It kind of just comes over me. My art is to inspire people along their journey. What eases the crossing of the lines? the blurring of the worlds? For me it was to trust myself enough to hold a brush, and then a pen, and to in some way get what is inside of me, out. To those who cannot fathom what it is like to hear voices, I would first say, listen. We should live in a society where we are free to hallucinate without fear of retribution.

Biography

Lauren Tenney, PhD, MPhil, MPA, BPS is a psychiatric survivor and environmental psychologist. First institutionalized at 15 years old, her often activist work uses video research and alternative media to shine light on institutional corruption which is a source of profit for organized psychiatry. She works to abolish state-sponsored human rights violations, such as murder, torture, and slavery, that are carried out via state-sponsored organized psychiatric industries. Even though 10e failed any art class they ever attempted, there is a solace that is found by her when the internal swirl can be pushed out onto canvas, to escape or more often memorialize the moment. Her solace is your scare and paintings like "Free Bird, Dead Bird" on a bloody snowy night were painted over by others to not disturb others in the house. One of the first paintings Tenney ever created was in 1990, titled, "Questions". She went about her work in the middle of the night, at about 17 years old. Her canvas, her bedroom wall. Her medium, exterior house paint found in the basement. Shortly after the screams of her parents woke her up when they discovered her work, and her work was dismissed as evidence of madness, she found an old ceiling board and painted it with mustard and ketchup. Not that she would suggest replication of her acts, these and other truths experienced in adolescence formed the ways that psychiatry used Tenney's creations as justification for mandated compliance with involuntary psychiatry. Psychiatrically drugged for many years, it was Tenney stumbling over the Mental Patients Liberation Alliance in the early 1990s that gave her the strength to reject the identity of mental patient which she was assigned and to stop taking the drugs she was compelled to ingest - forced into a chemical straitjacket that did not stop the choir she, but no one else, heard. In 1999. Tenney in the role of New York State Office of Mental Health's first Recipient Affairs Specialist and Statewide Project Director promoting youth rights and abolition of forced psychiatry, participated in a gallery showing her seminal oil painting, "Movement". Tenney remains hopeful and uses her art to tell the world of the human rights violations psychiatry commits against people, particularly young people. Her art, for a short time was recognized and championed the abilities that young people locked up by psychiatry have to offer, when they find their voice and speak from their unique perspectives. Grappling with trauma and other pains, Tenney emerged into the world of oils and sprays as a complete detox from psychiatric drugs commenced. Feeling feelings not felt for forever, multiplicity became a theme in a series of paintings from the early 2000s and can be spotted in her works to the current day. Through art and activism, Tenney was reborn as a psychiatric survivor and demander of human rights for all people. From the first strokes made, Tenney explored pure abstractions and figures and in the last year has focused on faces, with the newer additions of acrylics with brushes and pens. Crucial in the last period of time is the act of the progression and videos of certain pieces such as "Hell", "Time-Warp", "Out of Fans", and "Out of Dreams" exist. 10e relies on art in multiple ways to manage the daily claptrap of life. Art is a means to an end, a unending failing search for peace and humor, and more often, an act of mediating internally perceived external experiences, killing time, and trying to communicate that which otherwise has been labeled chimerical . . . Tenney's goal is to fund their activism and historical work with the sale of their art. Chimerical. Baaa Therapy. Human rights, now.

Exhibition History (CV)