Galoshans is an immersive, mobile enabled Halloween experience connecting ancient values with modern practice. Galoshans seeks to dispel the idea of Halloween as a shallow, consumerist holiday by highlighting key lessons it can teach us. Indeed, even the name Galoshans represents a Gaelic-Scots name for the practice we now call, Trick or Treating. Users will be dropped into a richly detailed 360 panorama world, where they will return to childhood and go door to door. However, instead of candy, users will receive essential parts of their own souls: Innocence, Compassion, Curiosity, Tradition, Courage, Wisdom and Sacrifice. Each home they visit will be decorated in theme for the virtue it represents. By the end of their journey, they will gain a deeper understanding of this holiday. It's not merely a silly capitalist occasion to sell costumes and sweets! It is rather serious, a spiritual time of connection. For this reason, Halloween has become a treasured tradition for marginalized groups such as the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, and in subcultures such as the Goth, Punk, and Fetish communities. Halloween encourages us all to look beyond superficial beauty and to be kind to anyone that crosses our threshold, no matter what they look like, or what mask they wear. It is my hope that this project will deepen viewer's ties to this tradition, and to their communities as a whole. For this project, I have built a 3D neighborhood in the virtual platform “Second Life”. This enables more accessibility on the creator's side. I am deeply familiar with this platform and have accumulated a lot of resources for content creation. This includes items such as the houses and decoration seen, as well as the land and sky. Second Life, however, has significant accessibility barriers on the side of the end user. This includes owning a computer capable of running the software, as well as cost barriers maintaining an avatar, and immersion in a world with its own culture and rules. As such, while Second Life was my main medium for this project, I have decided to display the final product on my own website with 360 panoramas. This, with careful planning of the final website, ensures that most anyone can participate. The minimal website design has been built so that the 360 image itself is the main asset to be loaded. The rest is, essentially, plain text – and this means I can load it even on my 7 year old busted tablet! I also am endeavoring to use image descriptions and larger text, so that persons with vision disabilities can read easily.
I have utilized assistance and mentoring from my best friend and artistic collaborator, Thomas J Butters. Tom has experience in designing assets for 3D platforms, including texturing in some modeling. Tom was also an assistant designer for my Second Life Life asset store from 2017- to early 2020. As such, his insight and assistance has been valuable- especially since he has a low end computer to test the website on, for accessibility reasons I hope that these few paragraphs have shed some light onto this project for you. I have done my best to keep the project broad yet detailed in focus, so that everyone viewing the website can get something out of it. It has long since been my dream to share the intense and rich meaning of Halloween with a wider audience. I want to thank The New Gallery, Mainframe, NaAC, Katie Wackett and Winona Julian for this opportunity and for the chance to display this project!
Eve M Johnson is a visual artist working in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Born with disabilities, she has been actively creating since the age of three. She creates art in a wide variety of mediums and has paintings, drawings, digital art, 3D modeling, and sculpture. While she was taking college level art courses at the age of 16, the art establishment was not a good fit for her, and she soon found herself ousted from this setting and creating independently. For ten years, she created simply for herself and received the label of “outsider artist”. Her work output intensified further after suffering a stroke in 2018 at the age of 23. Despite this, Eve joined the National Access Arts Centre in late spring of 2021. Since joining this institution, Eve has had her work shown locally and internationally- as far away as Seoul , South Korea. She has also made herself known at local art events and disability arts conferences within the Southern Alberta region. She has had a long standing passion for Albertan disability arts. She has promoted them to relevant organizations and financiers in networking settings such as the 2024 Beginnings Conference in Canmore, Alberta. Eve's work is defined by its adaptability to different mediums and its ability to tackle complex subject matter.
Thomas J Butters is an emerging digital artist from Athens, Pennsylvania. Since childhood he has had a strong fascination with mechanical systems such as telephones, fire hydrants, trains, and old radios. This fascination has followed him into adulthood with a strong desire to replicate these systems in virtual environments, and educate others about their history and origins. Thomas initially started working on these items for platforms such as The Sims and IMVU, but in 2017 was coaxed into joining Second Life by his long time friend, Eve. The accuracy and functionality of 3D models and textures produced by the pair received high reviews and many sales. As such, for a project involving Second life, Thomas' knowledge and input were essential to executing this project. Thomas has worked for years as an “outsider artist” and is looking forward to being “Brought inside” the art world with this inaugural project.
The New Gallery and Eve M Johnson gratefully acknowledge the support from and collaboration with
