UHN Cancer Experience Program

Blueberries with Nan

Jordan Bennett is a Mi’kmaw visual artist from Stephenville Crossing, Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). He currently works and lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS). His work, Blueberries with Nan, uses elements from Mi’kmaq visual culture to speak to the growth and beauty that can result from change and hardship.

Images of blueberries represent Bennett’s fond memories of his grandmother, with time spent learning about their land while picking blueberries. The fields would be burned at the end of blueberry picking season, which taught Bennett about the cycle of life, death, and renewal as th​e burning enabled new growth to flourish. For him, blueberries represent medicine, power, and hope, and bringing blueberries to share at feasts was a common familial and community practice. Similarly, Bennett shares this medicine, through this thoughtful artwork, with those affected by cancer.

Bennett honours the importance of places like The Princess Margaret to support, hold up and breathe life and new ways forward in the collective goal of conquering cancer in our lifetime. Pink double curves represent this breath, movement, growth, and life. At the base of this breath is a flame, the catalyst for change and renewal. The striped circle motifs represent time through season, and the stages of a single day. On the right, stars based on petroglyphs from Mi’kma’ki symbolize the connection to the spirit world and ancestors, while the droplets on the left represent tears to illustrate the water that connects all beings to Mother Earth. It is Bennett’s hope that these colours and symbols will encourage a moment to breathe and be filled with the optimism of new growth.

Artwork is courtesy of Jordan Bennett and R​xART Canada, visit https://rxartcanada.ca​​ for more information.

For more information about Jordan Bennett, visit https://www.jordanbennett.ca

Location photography by Michael Cullen Photography

Braids

Multidisciplinary artist Wally Dion explores the personal and c​ultural significance of braiding in this graphic drawing. Though there are varying meanings and teachings on braids across Indigenous communities, for Dion, braiding represents strength, spirituality, care, skill and companionship. For him, the act of braiding hair is a dynamic of love and tru​st, and wearing braids can serve as a form of resistance and self-actualization. The vibrant colours draw inspiration from the natural environment and the interconnection between soils and plants.

Born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1976, Wally Dion is a member of Yellow Quill First Nation (Saulteaux) and currently based in Binghamton, New York. He holds a BFA from the University of Saskatchewan and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Dion’s paintings, drawings and sculptures can be found in numerous collections including the Canadian Museum of History, MacKenzie Art Gallery and the Portland Art Museum.

Collection of the Canada Council Art Bank. For more information about Wally Dion, visit www.wallydion.com​​

The Wind Does Not Move in One Direction

Guided by his explorations in the Canadian wilderness, Steve Driscoll translates his encounters into immersive and colour-saturated depictions of landscape. His technique embraces painterly spontaneity and experimentation, yet it is measured by his deep understanding of the industrial materials he employs. Often influenced by social media, advertising and architecture, his use of colour and light reflects these everyday experiences.

Steve Driscoll was born in Oakville, Ontario in 1980 and received his BFA from OCAD University in 2002. Recent museum exhibitions include I closed my eyes but the light was still there at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery (2020) and Size Matters at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (2017).

He is currently represented by Nicholas Metivier Gallery in Toronto.

Lily Pond

Jamelie Hassan’s dynamic watercolour may call to mind Monet’s Water Lilies in its expressive brushwork, palette of violet-blues, pinks and greens, and the lack of a horizon line, which draws attention to the water’s surface. Though seemingly impressionistic in its formal elements, Hassan’s painting carries deep political and environmental undertones. Her interest in landscape is informed by multi-layered histories and urgent issues of our time, such as the human impact on our natural environment. In this painting, the lilies are lively and thriving, acting as symbols of resistance and hope.

Jamelie Hassan, born in London, Ontario, of Arabic background, is a visual artist and was one of the founders of two artist-run centres in London, Ontario: the Forest City Gallery (1973-present) and the Embassy Cultural House (1983-1990/2020 - to present). Her work is represented in numerous public collections in Canada and internationally, including The New Museum, NY (NY, USA), and the Library of Alexandria (Alexandria, Egypt). She received the "Canada 125" Medal for outstanding community service in 1993, the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2001 and an honorary doctorate from OCAD University, Toronto in 2018.

Collection of the Canada Council Art Bank. For more information about Jamelie Hassan, visit www.jameliehassan.ca

Flipped, Hermanas, Enredada/Entangled, Eyes On Me

Jasmine Cardenas is a Canadian-Ecuadorian multidisciplinary artist, working in sculptural painting, collage and installation. She takes inspiration from familial oral histories, childhood, dreams and a multitude of traditions through the diasporic lens of her Latin American Canadian identity.

Cardenas presents four abstract paintings that use layers of collage, found and recycled materials, pumice stone and sand to build up the canvas. Her unique combination of texture and rich, vibrant palette creates images that evoke natural shapes (leaves, trees, flowers) and landscapes. These paintings represent a connection to Cardenas' descendants and ancestors whose spirits live on through her acts of making.

For more information on Jasmine Cardenas visit www.jasminecardenas.ca

Drought

Paterson Ewen grew up in Montreal and spent much of his adult life there until he moved to London, Ontario, in 1968. In February 1948, he began studies at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ School of Art and Design. His first public exhibition in Montreal was in 1950, and he continued to exhibit regularly throughout his career until his death. Drought is a traditional landscape in terms of the relationship between ground and sky. Inspired by a severe drought in Pierre, South Dakota, which forced animals out of the region due to withered pastures. As much as Drought reveals Ewen’s interest in meteorological and atmospheric phenomena, it also speaks to his fascination with celestial objects and surfaces through his depiction of clouds, which here appear to be solid, consistent ovoid forms, reminiscent of planets or moons.

Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Gift of Michael and Sonja Koerner, 2018. © Mary Alison Handford

Benedicte, Omnia Opera

Kathleen Margaret Graham RCA was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1​​913. She gr​aduated from Trinity College at ​​the University of Toronto with a degree in home economics in 1936. She never received a formal education or training in art. She is known for becoming a painter at the age of 50 after her husband died in 1962. During ​travels with her husband, she visited art galleries and museums, developing her love of art. Encouraged by Jack Bush to paint, Graham had her first solo art exhibition in Toronto in 1967.

Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Purchase, 1973. © Art Gallery of Ontario

Mother with Children

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