@justtracyjustcause: Warabé Aska and the Renison I Hoped For Around 2002–03, after The Retreat and Surrender, Renison mounted an exhibition in its main gallery—the room where Academic Council, or faculty governance by any other loosely formed name, ordinarily met. The exhibition featured works Warabé Aska had created for traumatized children. Aska had not begun as a healer. Born in Japan, he first worked in commercial art and graphic design. After moving to Toronto, he volunteered with local children’s services, sharing art with children who had experienced trauma. The paintings exhibited at Renison grew from what he witnessed there. Somewhere along that journey, his art became more than something beautiful to see. It became somewhere wounded children could safely go. His images did not interrogate. They invited. A child did not have to explain what had happened. The child could enter through colour, movement and imagination. A forest became a carousel. A tree resolved into the creatures of the earth. The closer one looked, the more life appeared. His art restored wonder without demanding disclosure. I fell in love with Lulie the Iceberg and Harmony. Later, at the East Asian Festival, I bid on—and won—The Carousel. It now hangs with Harmony in my home. Despite its shortcomings, Renison still showed its potential then. In the same room where committees debated programs, budgets and institutional priorities, Aska’s work offered another understanding of education. Art, culture and human suffering were brought into communion. Knowledge was not merely administered; it was used to restore a child’s relationship with the world. For a moment, the institutional veil lifted. I saw what Renison could be: not merely a place that awarded credentials or performed collegiality, but a community capable of recognizing suffering and answering it with beauty, imagination and care. And I had hope. After Gail left, Renison lost its sense of self. Before Glenn arrived, it had already lost the plot. Enter the Y2K wave. We entered an institution whose identity was weakening and whose future was being improvised in real time. We did not create its confusion. We arrived inside it—and were expected to make it work. For years, the Aska exhibition remained evidence that another Renison had once been possible. If the institution had revealed that possibility once, perhaps it could still find its way back. But the Sixth Station is not only the moment when a veil is lifted. Veronica’s cloth receives the imprint of the suffering face beneath it. Once revealed, the truth cannot be unseen. For a traumatized child, the veil may be silence, fear or the inability to name suffering. When it lifts, the pain becomes visible. But the cloth does more than expose it: it receives the imprint. The child no longer has to carry the whole image alone. Aska’s art became that compassionate surface. It allowed suffering to appear without being demanded or displayed. Within his images, pain could pass through imagination into renewed life. That is what Harmony reveals. From a distance, we see one tree. The closer we look, the more life appears: animals, birds and creatures of land, water and sky, all held within one living whole. The tree is not dead. Life was present all along, waiting to be seen. That was the hope Aska offered wounded children—and the hope Renison once offered me. Eventually, the veil lifted again. This time, I did not see Renison’s potential. I saw what remained after that potential had been surrendered. I stayed because I had found hope. I left because I found none. Today, I have released most of my memories of Renison. But I refuse to give up my Askas. That is asking too much. Every morning, I awake to Harmony and the potential of what the world could still be. Renison lost its sense of self. It lost the plot. But it did not take from me what Warabé Aska revealed. Life is still there, waiting to be seen. I still have hope. I still see the light—HOME. ⚖️🦉🪽⚜️ #hope #peace #Home #truth #childhood

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Sunday 30 August 2026 20:24:50 GMT