Brad Necyk - Edmonton, AB

In August, we’re thrilled to welcome Brad Necyk, an artist whose practice engages with issues of medicine, mental health, and precarious populations and subjects. In the final year of his Ph.D. in Medicine, his work explores the relationships and possibilities that exist by breaking down barriers of understanding around mental health through art.

“Over the past three years, I have been spending time across Canada working with marginalized, ill people (cancer patients, transplant recipients, indigenous suicide survivors in the Arctic, and mentally ill patients) co-creating art . . . [my art and research] allows those who may not have already experienced illness or trauma to empathetically engage with the possibility of that experience. In creating works on these subjects, I aim to develop a new visual and affective language for expressing illness in modern culture, one that hopefully calls into question the everyday narratives through which we normally understand what it means to be ill. To do this, I employ large-scale photographic work, video, theatre, 3D imaging and printing, film, performance, sculpture, and installation art, with the intent of destabilizing viewers, creating a space for new narratives to form.”