Here it comes again! Jared Quinney

Here it comes again! is an exhibition by Jared Quinney that brings humour, colour, and curiosity into conversation with themes of healing and connection to the natural world. Through depictions of animals and imagined environments, Jared invites viewers into a space rich with his storytelling and observation.

Before becoming an artist, Jared worked for many years as a dishwasher while managing physical illness. During that time, he discovered art as a way to restore himself. What began as a personal coping strategy grew into a full creative career. He wants to share the sense of comfort he finds in the studio with others, especially those navigating difficult moments. “I like the idea of people in the hospital who might be going through hard times to get inspired and feel peaceful when they look at my art, the same way that I get peace from making it.”

Jared is a member of the Nina Collective, a group of over 200 artists with developmental and other disabilities, supported by the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts. Working across painting, printmaking, sculpture, and textiles, he draws inspiration from avid reading and a deep interest in natural history. Animals frequently appear as central characters in his compositions, accompanied by witty titles that hint at backstories and personalities, encouraging viewers to imagine the narratives unfolding within each work.

Originally from Saddle Lake Cree Nation, Quinney values collaboration and mentorship, often working with fellow artists on shared projects and workshops. His practice reflects both personal and collective creativity and is grounded in generosity and joy.

With its vibrant imagery and gentle humour, Here it comes again! offers a reminder that art can be a source of comfort and renewal. Pause, smile, and connect with the power of imagination.

Garden of Earthly Delights

Garden of Earthly Delights is an exhibition exploring meditative spaces and therapeutic objects. This is the first duo exhibition blending the practices of Mika Haykowksy and Alicia Proudfoot. Themes of wellness and illness, somatics and the body, and sculptural sound-making unify their practices. Their work comes together as a retreat space of sculpture and sonic installation. Earthy ceramic fountains, a modified harp, a marble sculpture, and leafy, soft-sculptural foliage fill the gallery—allowing guests to rest in a calming and curious atmosphere.

This exhibition provides solace, peace, and creativity for hospital guests, patients, and staff alike. The artists strive to make the gallery a welcoming and warm space that connects people within this healing building.

Alicia’s work pursues the gentle conviction of breath. No matter how imperceptibly still, breathing encourages us to move and speak. Her sound and sculptural components convey her experience of chronic asthma through pendulum-like waves of health that are both lighthearted and complex. Two marble statues stand like sentries, guarding the heart of the garden. Each is an absurd transformation of the respiratory system, revealing Alicia’s playful approach to living with illness. Y.O. – Y.O. renders alveoli into a pomegranate that is also a children’s commodity, giving a delicious shine to the polyp fruit. Broth is an enchanting chalice in which a twisting rubber chicken echoes the hollowness of the lung chamber. Visitors who choose to rest near these works can ponder the fictitious rituals they were designed for. On her augmented harp, Alicia shares a deeply personal and hauntingly beautiful sound, layering recorded soundscapes, digital components, and a new pair of carved legs inlaid with marble, elevating the instrument to perch like a preening creature in the garden.

Mika’s artistic practice investigates inner states of the body, like memories resting in our soft muscles, long forgotten. Her work touches on collective healing, pain and pleasure, and love addiction. The ceramic works presented in Garden of Earthly Delights are a culmination of experiments created during her residency at the Medalta Historic Clay District in Medicine Hat. Mika’s sculpting hands play with aggressive clay texturing methods and the fluidity of letting water find its own path—flow. Cycles of life, ecosystems, fertility, and extinction are central themes in her work. Fountains represent infinite cycles and bring subtle, soothing rhythms into the space. Incorporating running water into the gallery draws viewers into their senses—touch, sound, and sight. Some may be tempted to reach out and feel the water on their fingers. Water is healing and provides the grounded essence of the earth.

Garden of Earthly Delights interprets aspects of the natural world—its ecosystems and patterns of coexistence—through the rhythms of the body. Fountains represent abundance, hope, and life. Marble is a fierce dreamer, staunchly imaginative in its resilience, while the harp is ever-changing in sound, air, and breath. The foliage, commissioned from Debbie Radke, brings a tender embrace to those traversing life’s experiences with health.

Opening Reception - January 9, 7-9 p.m. Register for free:

• Mika Haykowsky

  Mika Haykowsky holds an MFA (2019) from the Trondheim Academy of Art and a BFA (2016) from the University of Alberta. They live and work out of Amiskwaciwâskahikan / ᐊᒥᐢᑲᐧᒋᐋᐧᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Edmonton, AB). From their studio in central Edmonton, Mika launches into creative projects that circle around the body, the cosmos, dreamscapes, inter-species co-creation, eco-feminism and stewarding the land. Follow their artistic journey on instagram @kahousemi.

• Alicia Proudfoot

  Alicia Proudfoot is an interdisciplinary artist with a penchant to modify formal training in sculpture, printmaking, and performance through audience-engaging prompts. Experimentation is a valuable component of her creative research about humor’s role in a somatic archive on illness. Alicia received a BFA from the University of Alberta in 2016 and graduated with an MFA from NSCAD University in 2019. Her work thrives alongside community engagement. She has permanent public artwork at the Performing Arts Theatre in Hinton, AB, and other haptic commissions through New Music Edmonton, the Silver Skate Festival, and The Works in Edmonton. Alicia has exhibited across Canada with some international opportunities through an internship at Franconia Sculpture Park, MN, USA; a group exhibition with Hernandez Gallery in Milan, IT; and a recent residency with the Digital Stone Project in Gramolazzo, IT, where she learned to robotically carve marble sculptures.

The Westburne Collection

The Westburne Collection:
Celebrating 100 years of Westburne’s commitment to Canadian Communities.

The University Hospital Foundation and Rexel Canada Electrical proudly present the Westburne Art Collection at McMullen Gallery, to mark the 100th anniversary of Rexel’s Westburne Banner. This significant corporate collection was started in the 1970s by John Scrymgeour, founder of Westburne, who would work with Westburne President Sam Abramovich to expand the collection. The collection grew into the 1990’s with guidance from renowned art curator Karen Wilkin, then Senior Curator at the Art Gallery of Alberta. The collection celebrates Canadian art and culture, featuring notable works by prominent Canadian artists of the period, including Jack Bush, William Perehudoff, and Gershon Iskowitz.

Curated by Natalie Ribkoff (Toronto), this exhibition shines light on several artists from the collection and their distinctive approaches to “painting the Prairie”. Many pieces will be shown publicly for the first time in over a decade. It features artists Barbara Ballachey, Robert Christie, Harold Feist, Terry Fenton, Gregory Hardy, Douglas Haynes, Dorothy Knowles, Kenneth Lochhead, Catherine Perehudoff, Rebecca Perehudoff, William Perehudoff, Otto Donald Rogers, and Robert Scott.

The Westburne Art Collection embodies Rexel Canada’s commitment to supporting Canadian communities. Rexel demonstrates social responsibility by investing in programs that support Indigenous peoples and youth, creating a legacy built on decades of service to Canada’s communities, as well as its commercial, industrial, and residential sectors. The collection is both a visual expression and celebration of Canadian culture, reflecting the values and relationships that guide Rexel's business and its ongoing contribution to community life.

To learn more visit:
https://rexel.ca

https://www.westburne.ca/cwr/

https://www.nedco.ca/cnd/

Selected Works:

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Dorothy Knowles, Flowers and Vases, Oil on canvas, 1980

Gregory Hardy, Storm Brewing, Oil on canvas, 1984

Dorothy Knowles, A Tangle of Roses, Acrylic on canvas, 1976

Douglas Haynes, Magenta, Acrylic on canvas, 1978

Rebecca Perehudoff, Pasture with Cattle, Acrylic on canvas, 1988

Otto Donald Rogers, Cool Green Tree, Oil on canvas, 1968

Terry Fenton, Mount Karma, Oil on board, 1984

Kenneth Lochhead, Black Cap, Watercolour on paper, 1963

Blue - Kelsey Stephenson

BLUE – Kelsey Stephenson
July 28 - September 14, 2025, in McMullen Gallery
8440-112 St NW
Monday – Friday: 9 a.m. -7 p.m.
Saturday – Sunday: 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

JOIN US for the Opening Reception Thursday, August 7, 7-9 p.m.

In Blue, artist Kelsey Stephenson invites you to experience the healing presence of Alberta’s glacial landscapes. Through the cyanotype process, a photographic technique developed with water, these works carry the vivid blues of melting ice and flowing rivers. Moving among large silk panels and delicate prints on paper, you’ll find yourself immersed in the cycles of freeze and thaw, light and shadow, stillness, and flow.

The imagery traces the path of the North Saskatchewan River from its headwaters in Banff National Park, drawing inspiration from the surrounding terrain of the Athabasca and Saskatchewan Glaciers. While glaciers tell stories of loss, they also feed the veins of our planet—melting into rivers, nourishing ecosystems, and reminding us that even in retreat, there is regeneration. This work holds space for renewal. It asks you to consider what it means to be well within yourself and the natural world. As you move through these layered, suspended pieces, there is time to breathe, to remember, and to reconnect with places that carry meaning and comfort.

The detailed paper works echo traditional darkroom photography, capturing subtle, fleeting moments that speak to the fragility and resilience of ice. The flowing silk panels evoke the sensation of glacial movement and river ice, inviting you to walk among them as if wandering through a memory of winter. We encourage you to view these pieces from all sides.

From urgency to awareness, from grief to grace, Stephenson’s Blue reminds us that the landscapes around you, and the water that flows through them, hold the power to nourish, sustain, and heal.

About the Artist
Kelsey Stephenson (she/her) is a Canadian artist and educator based in Edmonton, within Treaty 6 Territory. Her large-scale multimedia installations explore water, ice, and land, often drawing from printmaking traditions to reflect on ecological change. Much of her work centers on the prairie watershed and glacial systems of Alberta, inviting viewers into immersive encounters with place. She teaches printmaking at the University of Alberta and is an active member of Edmonton’s artist-run communities. Her practice bridges art and environmental awareness, creating space for reflection, care, and connection.
https://kstephenson.ca/

Shadow Bloom - Elisabeth Belliveau + Darrell Spearman

Shadow Bloom
Elisabeth Belliveau + Darrell Spearman

Shadow Bloom explores the delicate interplay between light and darkness, growth and stillness, through the works of artists Elisabeth Belliveau and Darrell Spearman. It asks what life becomes when we delight in subtle moments rather than conventional notions of success—when we honor growth even when it seems invisible and intangible, like the quiet yet profound transformations embodied in flowers that emerge, evolve, and reshape their surrounding landscape.

Belliveau's kinetic sculptures manifest as abstract mother(ing) forms that transcend traditional identities. Her suspended mobiles and tabletop pieces embody the rhythms of caring, resting, playing, and maintaining balance. Drawing inspiration from formalist sculpture, Ikebana flower arranging, and her experiences of motherhood, Belliveau collaborates with her two-year-old son to create works that engage children and adults alike in contemporary abstract art through processes of balance, play, and material experimentation.

In conversation with these sculptural forms, Spearman's poetry offers moments of quiet contemplation. As a multidisciplinary artist from Brooklyn practicing writing and dance, Spearman uses flora as metaphors to confront and comfort difficult feelings, honoring the process of unraveling. His collected poems explore change—its complexities, pain, healing, and beautiful simplicities—like the weeds, thorns, buds, and blooms that inhabit gardens.

Both artists observe power in moments of hope, balance, and playfulness. Their work exists in the tension between positive and negative space, between light and shadow. Through this exhibition, they invite us to pay attention to the unseeable, to offer compassion to ourselves and others, and to slip into tenderness.

Poetry Albums - Darrell Spearman

Shadow Bloom - Exclusives

Shadow Bloom - Window Poems

Selected Images - Elisabeth Belliveau

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Artists on The Wards: "For Artists on 'Not Artists'"

October 15 - December 1, 2024

When we walk onto your unit, or into your hospital room, we don’t want to put you to work by making you paint or clap your hands to a song. We want to learn who you are beyond ‘patient’. It’s okay if you are ‘not an artist’, we know you have interests and passions that can engage and inspire you. Though we are not ‘art therapists’, what we offer is therapeutic. Research continues to show that engaging in, or even chatting about, creative interests can have a lot of different benefits. 

As an embedded artist/researcher and Psychiatry graduate student, I curated this exhibition of both staff and patient work relating to the diverse ways that the Artists on the Wards engage the University of Alberta Hospital community, and have done so for 25 years.

-Jennie Vegt

What We Carry 唐人街 - Curated by Jordon Hon 韓寶軒 and Shawn Tse 謝兆龍

August 19 - October 4, 2024
Closing Reception: Friday, October 4, 7-9pm

How does art play a role in the evolution of our cultural spaces?

We often think of Chinatowns as places to preserve and honour the past. But how do we embrace evolution while fostering decolonization, inclusion, and community ownership? We don’t have clear answers for the future of Chinatown, but our work in the community is driven by knowing how interconnected Chinatown is with major issues we face as a society.

These works inspired by Edmonton’s Chinatown carry stories of intergenerational relationships, healing, and deep community bonds greater than we can put into words. We hope this art will inspire critical reflections of our cultural spaces and continue to expand our imaginations for what Chinatown can be.

藝術在文化空間的演進該扮演什麽角色?

我們經常想唐人街是一個保存文化和榮耀過去的地方。但是當我們面對著促進反殖民化、包容化及社區擁有權的時候， 我們能如何迎接文化的演變呢？對於唐人街的未來我們沒有清晰的答案， 但是，我們在社區内的工作是由明白到唐人街與切身重要的社會問題互相交接而驅使的。

這些作品都是發自遠遠超過文字可以表達的埃德蒙頓市唐人街跨年代的人際關係、創傷復原、及深厚的社區關係。我們希望這些作品能引發大家對文化空間 這個課題  進行嚴謹的反思和繼續擴張我們對一個理想的唐人街的構想。

Background Photo: Lee Rayne Lucke
Exhibition Photos: Jordon Hon
Translations: Wai-Ling Lennon

if slow is where we're heading

Exhibition Dates: March 9 - May 19, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, March 15 7-9pm

An embroidery needle slips through the warp and weft of soft linen fabric. The flash of cool steel is followed by a lazy trail of lilac thread interconnecting the fibres, holding them close. Text emerges slowly, an act of revelation sustained over days, months, and even years. Our stories reveal themselves on their own time. Inspired by the frameworks of disability justice and queer crip theory, this exhibition is a celebration of slowness as an embodied act of queer resistance. Showcasing a collection of works by artists Richard Boulet and Chelsey Campbell, each piece reveals the transformative capacity of crip storytelling, liberatory access, and care built and nurtured over time. Weaving together textiles, installation, and print media with narratives of resistance, kinship, and healing, if slow is where we’re heading invites the audience to rest, to sit with our stories and listen to the wisdom of their bodyminds. To bend the clock, break it.

Richard Boulet (he/him) is a queer crip artist who focuses on the empowerment of the individual and, therefore, community through the importance of mental health. Richard works in amiskwacîwâskahikan on Treaty 6 territory (or Edmonton, Alberta). Starting with creating children’s books for a friend, he took a winding path to reach primarily textile work. His current focus is cross-stitching and beading exploring mental health and emerging expressions of being queer, as well as simple ideas on kinship. This artist identifies as the tortoise rather than the hare.

Chelsey Campbell (they/she) is a queer crip artist, educator, and cultural worker in amiskwacîwâskahikan on Treaty 6 territory (or Edmonton, Alberta). Exploring narratives of disability justice, feminized care labour, and crip kinship, their practice intertwines performance autoethnography with community-oriented practices of access, care, and interdependence. The exhibition itself was developed slowly, making space for ideas and crip kinship to flourish, revealing itself over time and many conversations between the artists and curators. The artists have collected a series of writings that explore some of the embodied experiences of slow as queer resistance that inform the work.