Autistic artist Adam Wolfond recreates his world for others to experience | Canada Voices

Toronto artist Adam Wolfond sits in a studio cheerfully decorated with large sticks he has wrapped in colourful fibres. He is pecking at a keyboard with one finger, slowly answering questions about his art: Wolfond, 22, is a non-speaking visual artist and poet, and he communicates by typing, referring to himself as the Man of Autism and explaining how he sees the world. The synthesized voice of a computer program then reads his text out loud to the listener.

“Meaning is more than words, and our bodies are more than one,” he said in a recent interview. “This is the autistic meaning of existence because we feel always the world so much, and we need the understanding. We need to make people more attuned to each other and this living world that moves us, assembling the varied love we can have for it.”

To achieve that communication, Wolfond has collaborated on an art installation that seeks to replicate the intense patterns, hypnotic pacing and sensory overload that he experiences. The work, What if My Body is a Beacon for the World?, is currently showing at Koffler Arts in the Youngplace complex on Toronto’s Shaw Street. The arts centre’s gallery is just across the hall from the studio Wolfond shares with his mother, artist and filmmaker Estée Klar, with whom he has co-founded dis assembly, an arts collective dedicated to exploring neurodiversity. Wolfond is also completing an independent M.A. program in fine arts and neuro-diversity at Concordia University.

The Koffler installation begins with a video that portrays Wolfond, or at least his busy hand, twirling a small stick as he stands at the water’s edge. This activity – he calls it twallowing – helps with navigation and seeing, and is a constant with him.

The installation continues with a video, projected on the floor, of sunlight sparkling on water – the kind of visual pacing that draws Wolfond in – and with a collage of half-glimpsed video images mounted on the wall. These images of plants and water were shot outdoors using a endoscopic camera of the kind that can be inserted into the body for medical purposes. Wolfond, who also uses body cameras, tethers it to a finger and inserts it inside things he encounters in nature. Klar explains that autistic people often can’t separate their body from their surroundings in the way the neurotypical do, and that Wolfond also experiences synesthesia, hearing colours, for example. The images, shot on Wolfond’s long walks around the city, represent the world as he experiences it. In the darkened space, sheets of sheer fabric hanging from the ceiling add to the notion of veiled perception while soft comfy chairs invite viewers to take a break.

Although Wolfond writes poetry – he has published a collection entitled The Wanting Way with the Minneapolis press Milkweed Editions – the video work strikes him as a more effective way of depicting his thought processes.

“Using typing makes a way of talking that is not my language, so making the video assemble[s] the Man of Autism’s ways, languaging that world that wells in my body.”

A master of liquid metaphors, he describes neurotypical people as packaging up meaning like cans of Campbell’s soup whereas he finds meaning in the rippling and pooling of water.

He finds it more difficult to describe how he himself experiences the art work which might have the potential to double his perceptive dissonance by representing it in the gallery. Instead, he stresses his art as a way of reaching across the divide or, as he puts it, dancing the atmosphere that opens him.

What if My Body is a Beacon for the World? shows at the Koffler Gallery, 180 Shaw St., Toronto to Jan. 26