Sheldon M. Chumir Centre Public Art

Seven artists were selected to create and display artwork within the street-level display windows of the centre.

The artist worked with the staff of the health centre to collect information of the spirit of health care programs in their most basic expressions. These elements are words, phrases, drawings and pictures which were chosen by the artists to develop the piece. The programs are represented by cardboard boxes which are filled with the materials used in each session.

The window display visually represents the colours and bursts of brain signal pulses by creating a mosaic of the brain using watercolour crystals techniques to create the fibrous and vibrant quality of brain activity. Abstract line work of the brain acted as a blueprint for the design and helped define each of the shapes in the waterco¬lour mosaic. Within each shape a unique watercolour wash was created and colour-mapped to the sections of the brain.

Ideas from passersby of the health centre were gathered to help create this piece. Participants were encouraged to draw the centre and take photos of their drawings which were stored on an Instagram account. The artists selected the most powerful images and created Walking Window.

Pencil drawn portraits of clients, staff and passersby of the Sheldon Chumir Health Centre, but only their eyes, not their faces. Drawing the eyes alone allows people to remain anonymous, but mostly, the eyes are the windows to the soul. This installation has captured the character and soul of each person and inspired understanding between passersby of the health centre as they see Eye to Eye.

With the intention of bringing awareness to the breadth of healthcare programs that the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre offers, Deja Vu is an installation that invites the passerby to reflect on the universal nature of our invisible wounds, creating glimpses of empathy and inclusiveness, reminding us that we are all the same.

How do you feel today? is a partially built wall within one of the south window spaces of the Sheldon M. Chumir Community Health Centre. The wall displays a dynamic, visual response from the collection of community member’s states of being over a period of six months. Visual responses, based off of an art therapy exercise, were gathered through community interactions and collection boxes. The responses were used to make an alternative map, according to colour and time-collected. This mapping method shows a range of individual emotion and interpretation colour in relation to emotion. The map will actively grow and change throughout the entirety of its installation giving community members a continuous, public display of emotion.

A visualization of the body as a vessel for narrative – as when an emptied bottle becomes a device for encapsulating messages of greatest urgency and intimacy, conveying them through the elements, across the sea. Installed in a vitrine on the South side of Chumir Health Centre are three long shelves, crowded with antique glass medicine bottles and the messages they bear. Ranging from clear to milky to iridescent, these old bottles provide the vehicle for fragments, secrets and stories – shuttling between thresholds. Mirrors, both aged and new, line the back of the vitrine, imparting intermittent messages through the glass bottles that have been placed as intermediaries between text and viewer - an effect which could alternately cloud or magnify our comprehension.​​​​