"Must’ve Been a Dream, From 1000 Years Ago speaks to the deception of never knowing whether one has broken a pattern in their work or continually reproducing it. Referencing Kim Gordon’s lyrics in “Shadow of a Doubt” by Sonic Youth in 1985, I see a connection with the tragic character in the song to the challenges in my own artistic practice. Constantly reliving trauma beneath the surface becomes like a subterranean trance expressed through hypergraphia. Empaths experience their own and other peoples trauma as if they are bound by its charge, attached to a cluster of them. Triggers will send them spiralling into it’s endless maze, unable to ground themselves or discern their own voices. Kim whispers about bumping into a stranger on the train, a chance encounter that sends ripples of change like video feedback through what she believes is predestined. In that moment a thousand possibilities exist, and the disturbance warps our perception of space and time itself. In that moment we decide to act, and our decisions haunt us like a slow motion spring reverb. The deafening echo can break our very grasp of reality. Do we change or stay the same? Do we act out of autonomy or react out of complacency? Do we never look again into the eyes of a stranger or do we hold that gaze and fall in love? Do we live happily ever after or do we parish in the flames of our own spark? Did I really break the pattern or was it just another dream of freedom, a dream my ancestors have had for a thousand years before me? In the eye of the storm we reach out for the warm embrace of the other in a courageous act of unknowing, risking everything for a chance to be free from what we can not escape." Jon Vaughn

Jon Vaughn is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, independent publisher, and experimental musician/DJ. Born in Treaty 4, Saskatoon, Vaughn also holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Art History from the University of Saskatchewan. Vaughn makes drawings, paintings, and prints that integrate abstraction and representation to explore themes of modern mysticism, cultural and family history, empathic reality, the stigma of the outcast and diasporic identity. References to films, comics, music and toy culture create points of access to Vaughn’s interior and cultural world. Their artwork has been exhibited and published across Canada (Saskatoon, Regina, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Moncton, North Bay, Sechelt) and the world (England, France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Latvia, Argentina, Bulgaria, Germany, The Czech Republic, Japan, China and the United States). Vaughn is currently enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Regina.