Insight to Mood Disorders and Bipolar

Artist Brad Necyk, PhD, MFA
Curator Dick Averns, MFA
Dr Scott Patten, PhD, specialist in mood disorders, Department of Psychiatry, University of Calgary

This free event accompanies our fall exhibition, Perspectives From Within, exploring mental health from the perspective of lived experience.

Join artist Brad Necyk for a screening of his autobiographical film Alberta #3, and learn more about his artwork and research spanning psychiatry and art. This event will be of interest to anyone wishing to learn more about how mental health is impacted by mood disorders, particularly Bipolar Affective Disorders, and how art can give a better understanding of these conditions.

The evening will be hosted by curator Dick Averns, commencing with an overview to the artworks in Perspectives From Within, and concluding with a question and answer session featuring Dr Scott Patten, a specialist in mood disorders, Department of Psychiatry, University of Calgary. All persons are welcome including those seeking help, family members, artists and anyone practising in related fields.

This is an in-person program. Masks are mandatory, and physical distancing will be maintained in seating arrangements. Contemporary Calgary requires visitors ages 12 and older to provide proof of vaccination, documentation of medical exemption, or a negative PCR or rapid test within the last 72 hours in order to enter the gallery.

Speaking on his work Brad says Alberta #3 is a meditation on family, heredity, madness, and time. The story is a first-person, non-linear account of a manic episode I lived in 2017 and the events surrounding it. I wrote this as part of my healing journey: a journey I am still on. I wrote it for my family, my caregivers, and I wrote it for the manic patients I healed with at the Centre for Addiction Health in Toronto.

I am also looking forward to meeting all the people just beginning their journey with bipolar or other mental health conditions, to let them know they are not alone. I believe art creates space to experience others' perspectives, and that is what I would like to share.”

About the Artist, Brad Necyk (he/him)

Brad Necyk is a Canadian visual artist, filmmaker, and writer with a Ph.D. in Psychiatry whose practice focuses on mental illness, empathy, consciousness, and flourishing. His doctoral research was awarded the Governor General's Gold Medal and will be published as a book of narrative poetry. Currently, he is a Postdoctoral Fellow in York University's Cinema & Media Arts department and a Research Associate in the Film & Digital Media department at the University of California Santa Cruz. His current research is creating virtual reality films on addiction, organ transplantation, and medical assistance in dying.

A Discussion with Ryan Sluggett and a special screening of his recent 2020 animation film, Ed Terrestrial

Thursday, October 21
5:30pm - 7:00pm

Of Ed Terrestrial, Jackson Arn, the American critic, has written:

“It’s never easy to make art that’s deliberately, self-consciously “about” society; to fail is to invite ridicule, and sometimes to succeed is to invite even more. The difficulty of the problem has led too many artists and critics to conclude that it’s pointless to try—a hedged, managerial sort of conclusion… I’ll say this much: for Ed Terrestrial, [Sluggett has] developed a style of animation that exposes the malevolence lurking beneath cozy, infantilizing entertainment; the sludge lurking beneath “good taste”; and the queasy cocktail of interest and disinterest that we’ve all been drinking—and anyone who doesn’t see the urgency of making art about these things has been living in a cave.”

Biography

Ryan Sluggett was born in 1981 in Calgary, Alberta. He received his BFA with Distinction in Painting from the Alberta College of Art + Design in 2003, and his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2011.

Ryan Sluggett has had nine solo exhibitions at TrépanierBaer Gallery; the most recent titled The Ego and the Ed (2021). Selected group exhibitions of note include: Summer Bomb Pop: Collections in Dialogue, Tang Museum, New York (2021); Everywhere You Are, Contemporary Calgary (2020/21); Out of Sight: New Acquisitions, Vancouver Art Gallery (2014); and Made in LA., the Hammer Museum Biennial (2012).

Sluggett has successfully completed numerous commissions. In 2013, he completed a major commission for the Ivey School of Business at Western Ontario University in London, Ontario. This large multi-paneled work is comprised of three panels measuring 8 feet by 8 feet each, for an overall dimension of 8 feet by 24 feet. In 2015, Sluggett completed a commission for a major video piece for a private collector in the United States; and he has recently completed a painting commission for a Canadian collector.

Sluggett’s work is included in numerous public collections including the Booth Collection at the University of Chicago; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Vancouver Art Gallery; Glenbow Museum, Calgary; the Rubell Collection, Florida; the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Collection, Edmonton; and numerous private and corporate collections throughout Canada and the US.