Name: From Prairie Clinic to Psychedelic Canvas a talk by Arnie Guha
Start: 2026-04-12T19:30:00-04:00
Location: Free Times Cafe

From Prairie Clinic to Psychedelic Canvas a talk by Arnie Guha

SOLUBLE FISH presents:
From Prairie Clinic to Psychedelic Canvas: Canada's role in psychedelic modernism
a talk by ARNIE GUHA
Sunday April 12, 2026, 7:30 PM
Free Times Café 320 College Street
PWYC
This talk explores an unexpected Canadian lineage linking Lawren Harris, the Arts & Letters Club, and the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who coined the term “psychedelic” on the Saskatchewan prairie in the 1950s. Tracing a path from Harris’s early Toronto paintings to his luminous northern landscapes, and onward to psychedelic visual culture, it argues that Canada played a quiet but foundational role in rethinking perception in the Twentieth Century. At its core is a simple but radical idea: that art is not about representing the world, but about transforming how we see it.
Arnie Guha is a Toronto-based artist working under the handle Acid4Yuppies, whose practice explores perception, altered states, and the afterimage of place through layered digital and photographic processes. He is Executive Chair of the John B. Aird Gallery, Chair of the Advisory Board of Green College, UBC, and Past President of The National Club. Alongside his artistic work, Arnie writes and speaks on AI, perception, visual culture, and the shifting boundaries between art, experience, and cognition.