The Galerie Buhler Gallery’s current exhibit is a celebration of family and the level of care that the St. Boniface Hospital provides.
The exhibit is called Cardially Yours, and it features both the physicians in the hospital’s cardioology unit and the family of the artist, Charles Romero Venzon. The connection between the two goes back over thirty years.
“When I was 19 back in ‘96, my father had a heart attack,” Venzon shares. “I thought with my work and when my practice was at the time, I thought I could connect his story with an exhibition here.”
Venzon still clearly remembers the day of his father’s heart attack. He was sitting between classes at the University of Manitoba when his uncle came and got him to be by his father’s side at St. Boniface Hospital.
“We arrived and my father had already gone into I wasn’t able to say hi or, you know, good luck,” Venzon remembers. After over fourteen hours of surgery and a double bypass, the doctors announced that Venzon’s father would eventually recover.
“We knew it was going to be a long road to recovery, but we felt like we were well supported at St. B.”
That experience is something that hannah_g, the gallery’s curator, says makes Cardially Yours such a powerful exhibit for patients, visitors and hospital staff. “One of the things which is really special about St. Boniface is that they really get art and how it supports good health outcomes,” she explains, sharing that when staff from the hospital’s cardiac sciences unit were approached to be a part of the project, they were delighted to be a part of the exhibit in the form of photographs as well as sharing vital information about what to do if patrons are having a cardiac episode.
The photographs of the hospital staff are paired with photographs of Venzon’s parents and family, celebrating life after his father’s heart attack. “The family portion and the joy aspect is really honouring my father, his legacy on our relationship with him, and for the youngest – my five-year-old who never met him – a way for her to build memories from.”
Venzon’s children all had a literal hand in the exhibit in creating freehand drawings of objects belonging to Venzon’s father, including a watch and even a heart valve. “I thought it would be fun to remember their Lolo, their grandfather through these drawing exercises of objects that he’s left behind for us,” Venzon says. “What you see are documentations of my imagined performative play that I feel like he might have had with them if he was still around with us.”
The visual art aspects of Cardially Yours are just one facet of the exhibit, which will be on display until March 30. hannah_g and the Buhler Gallery commissioned a choral piece of music based on the relationship between the heart and lungs by Winnipeg composer Ashley Au. The piece, entitled “Figure of Eight”, will be shared at the gallery by the SonoLux choir along with staff members from St. Boniface Hospital on February 28 at 7 p.m.
“Ashley got incredible access just as Charles did to the cardiac sciences, made relationships with staff, could listen to machines, could listen to different arrhythmias and then create a piece of choral music,” hannah_g shared. “It’s this way of kind of embodying this experience, like their heart and their lungs are then going to be producing this beautiful sound.”
“This is the legacy of one surgery here,” hannah_g says, gesturing around at the gallery. “It’s just putting human faces onto the procedures.”
