Artist, heal thyself

Everybody says that being artistically creative has health benefits. It can help people to heal from psychological traumas, or at least deal with trauma’s lingering effects.

The Art Gallery of St. Albert invites us to look inside Healing Process, its new exhibit where three artists are sharing the results of their own healing creations.

“The day I found out my father had pancreatic cancer, his life, my life and my family’s lives’ changed forever. A terrible loss was coming, the clock had started ticking. We would all never be the same. I spent the next 13 months photographing Dad, telling his story and mine,” writes social documentary photographer Gerry Yaum.

His photo series called My Father's Last Days is one of the key ingredients of the show. These black and white portraits show the man in a hospital bed, with nasal tubes and other pieces of medical apparatus showing, his face sometimes stretched into a yawn of apparent pain. Other times, he has a kind of lost, tormented look on his drawn face as though he was in a war camp, struggling to survive while losing his humanity at the same time.

Through his camera, Yaum is working to not only demonstrate the suffering that often comes with the end of a life through disease but also working to understand that pain. The photographs stand as a permanent tribute even though his father passed more than two years ago. They show how he tried to reach in to his father’s world. It’s a provocative and intimate thing to share but so incredible to bear witness to.

“I believe that the greatest achievement I can attain as an artist is to educate, inform and provoke discussion through my work,” he writes on his website at gerryyaum.blogspot.ca. “My job as an artist is create work that shows the shared connection, the shared humanity all human beings have…”

Joining Yaum in the exhibit are British Columbia-based artist Sima Elizabeth Shefrin and University of Alberta printmaking grad Darian Goldin Stahl. Shefrin offers the Embroidered Cancer Comic, the artist’s own interpretation of the cancer journey after her husband’s diagnosis.

“When we learned that Bob had prostate cancer, and not the slow growing kind, we started making cancer jokes. Every time something made us laugh, one of us would say, ‘That goes in the comic’,” she writes on her website at www.stitchingforsocialchange.ca.

The comic itself is comprised of fairly basic drawings, but the humour and the humanity are there in the word balloons. She explained that she often uses her art to work through life events, evoking awareness and invoking conversation about what is taboo.

“But nothing has made me feel as vulnerable as the creation of this comic. At the same time it has helped me realize that when you’re there, cancer becomes a part of daily life, like buying groceries or washing dishes. On the night of Bob’s diagnosis we made a decision to get married, and one of our marriage vows was to never lose our sense of humour. I offer this project in partial fulfilment of my wedding vows. It is so important that we laugh as well as cry.”

Stahl completes the show with her installation work called MRI IN USE featuring a series of life-sized photographic prints of standard hospital gowns with the text of medical scans projected onto them. They are the result of the artist working with her sister who has multiple sclerosis. The gowns are suggestive of the procedures that she must undergo in her examinations, leaving the viewers with that distinctive notion of losing one’s identity as one’s health falters.

The works not only brought the sisters closer together but also offer the public the fleeting chance to vicariously experience the medical system, giving all the moment to reflect on our precious and precarious mortality.

“Ultimately, the viewers themselves become a part of piece, as their bodies catch the projection, cast shadows over the swaying prints, and act as the human proxy missing from the empty, floating gowns. The interaction between the installation and attendees evokes questions of authority, tacit participation, and interconnectedness,” she explained.

“I aim for viewers to identify with this figure, and come to find that we all carry anxiety about the functionality of our bodies. While this work is specifically about my sister’s anticipation of impairment, disability is a future most people will face if they live into old age. Therefore knowing and understanding people with different bodies and abilities and adds insight, dimension, and value to the human condition. When audiences see my work, even though they do not know my sister, they feel her and are filled with a shared, connecting reflection over the state of our ever-changing bodies.”