Mobility For Parkinson’s Disease

Rich Theroux is a local artist, educator, author, and community leader. He has been running (Gorilla) now Rumble House for nearly 9 years. Through the arts space he has had the joy of meeting incredible people within the Calgary community and was introduced to Your Brain on Art last summer. He has been in conversation with incredible scientists from the University of Saskatchewan including Alison Oates and those conversations evolved into a kinetic painting based on her research. Their work on stabilizing patients through external input was greatly inspirational to Rich as his mother is currently dealing with the stages of Parkinson's and all the effects the disease has on the balance centre of the body. Rich started with the background, stepping in paint and walking across the board. He then brought in a model, Georgia, to stand in for his mother who was unable to make it to the studio. The resulting portrait is a combination of Georgia and Priscilla. To finish this piece, the sense of balance was achieved by attaching the whole painting to a swivelling back. The two anchors are reminiscent of the external anchors that Alison and her team were working on experiments with.