Tom McKinnon
Artist, Film Maker
Tom McKinnon is an established visual artist with over 25 years of experience as a sculptor, painter, and media and performance artist. His work explores the role of narrative structure in cognition, identity, and belief. He has exhibited multi-media performance works at venues nationally and internationally, notably at The Kitchen in New York in 1990 and at PS 1 in New York in 1992.
Tom earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Art History from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and a Master of Fine Arts in Multi Media from the University of Windsor. He has been featured and reviewed in ArtForum and Art in America. A dynamic and versatile educator, he has taught Fine Arts at Northern College in the subarctic community of Moosonee, Multi-Media at the University of Windsor, and Sculpture at Okanagan University College in Kelowna.
Over the past four years, Tom has focused on video as a narrative, artistic, and educational medium, with a particular interest in the documentary genre.
Tom's film collaborator, AyasminA, is a professional translator, interpreter, legal advocate, and documentarian fluent in six languages, whose lifelong passion for people and travel is dovetailed with her longstanding interest in spirit medicine from around the world. Over the past six years, AyasminA's focus has been on South American naturopathy, in particular the traditions and techniques of Amazonian plant medicine, known as vegetalismo. (see Bio)
Not surprisingly, Tom and AyasminA met at a medicine gathering, and a long term friendship, partnership, and vision was instantly forged. Since 2005, AyasminA and Tom have been collaborating on various projects around Amazonian medicine, culture, and ecology. They recently completed a radio documentary with Len Cler Cunningham entitled "In Search of the Divine Vegetal", which explores the nexus of Western and Indigenous cosmologies in relation to plant intelligence, and which was met with considerable interest and support when it aired worldwide in November 2007. Due to popular demand, part 1 of "In Search of the Divine Vegetal" was re-broadcast on the CBC Radio program "Ideas" on May 16th, and part 2 on May 23rd, 2008. The program is available at the Convergence website and more information, including podcast details, is available at:
Tom and AyasminA are currently in the process of converting their radio documentary into a film by the same name and, to this end, have prepared a demo-length version of their video documentary, which is featured here:
http://www.dailymotion.com/panoramabox
This documentary, like its audio counterpart, aspires to engender a species of hybrid consciousness consisting of Western science, Indigenous technology, phytospirituality, and the Great Unknown. Heading into the final stages of production and wishing to remain independent, AyasminA and Tom are looking to raise the necessary funding to bring their vision to fruition.
At this year's Amazon Convergence retreat,Tom and AyasminA will be presenting on the making of their documentary, the process and pitfalls of eliciting and evaluating culturally-specific information, and some of the logistical, environmental, legal, political, and ethical challenges they have faced in attempting to make esoteric, Indigenous practice accessible to the Western mind.
AyasminA and Tom feel it has been well-established that nature offers invaluable diagnostic and healing tools. Such foundation being laid, they are eager for us to learn to implement this age-old knowledge in order to navigate uncharted esoteric realms and produce meaningful and innovative outcomes for the modern individual and world-to-be.
