Art with heart

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This article was published 08/02/2025 (625 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WHAT IT IS: Depicting two stages of a cardiac medical procedure, this pair of photographs is part of the exhibition Cardially Yours by Winnipeg artist Charles Romero Venzon, now on view at Galerie Buhler Gallery.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Located within the St. Boniface Hospital, Galerie Buhler Gallery often shows art that specifically speaks to this institutional context, addressing issues around medicine, healing and physical and mental health.

These large-scale digital prints, documenting before-and-after images of an angioplasty, get to the heart of the matter. Venzon’s show is centred around the Cardiac Sciences Manitoba program at St. B., and these images suggest the hidden labour and complex skills that keep this crucially important unit of the hospital ticking.

In a months-long process, Venzon — who works across media but does a lot of lens-based art — was given close access to the cardiac-care program’s health professionals and their working environments. He photographed nurses, doctors, medical technicians, cleaners, clerks and Hero, the therapy dog.

His images convey a lot of objective information about the everyday work that goes on at the hospital. But Venzon also has a deeply subjective connection to this theme. In 1995, the artist’s father had a heart attack at age 56, and thanks to lifesaving surgery at St. Boniface, went on to have 21 more years with his family before his passing in 2016.

To protect patient privacy, Venzon’s working method strictly observed the Personal Health Information Act. This pair of angioplasty photographs allows him to “show” a medical procedure without showing a medical procedure. Looking at the before-and-after images of this crowded but carefully organized space, we can imagine the gap between.

Even without witnessing the actual operation, we get a sense of the labour, the knowledge and the meticulous prep involved in the process. We don’t need graphic, reality-TV-type images: A small spot of blood on the “after” image is enough to call up the human stakes of this story.

Venzon’s photos do function as documentary realism. There are the visual markers of a working hospital in these images — the white flannel sheet with blue stripes, the blinking machines, the electrical cords, the stacks of paper and files.

But the scale of the images expands their effect. Some of Venzon’s photos are printed on poly silk and hung from the ceiling. Some are conveyed through life-size video projections.

The larger context of Venzon’s show also affects how we relate to the photos. Taken by themselves, these images might seem at first, well, clinical. But Venzon weaves in his own experiences throughout the exhibition, adding layered emotional resonance.

Venzon puts his own body on the line, in a series of vulnerable images that show him undergoing a stress test, an echocardiogram and an EKG. There are family portraits and medical documents. There are lovely pencil and pastel drawings of objects important to Venzon’s late father, on which the artist has collaborated with his own children.

With these added elements, Cardially Yours becomes Venzon’s poignant and personal expression of the intergenerational impact of the hospital’s work.

WHY IT MATTERS: The language around photography can sound aggressive or cold. People “take” or “shoot” or “capture” images. There’s an idea that the camera looks at the world as an impassive, distanced recorder.

Venzon’s art suggests something kinder, gentler, more co-operative. We can sense Venzon forming relationships and building trust, working with his subjects to convey the full human dimension of the health-care system.

These photographs convey the state-of-the-art technology and scientific expertise that go into 21st-century cardiac health care. (And remember, readers, February is Heart Month.) But they also touch on the timeless metaphorical connotations of the heart. Centuries of art, music and poetry have portrayed the heart as the locus of feeling, and in Venzon’s work, it is intimately bound up with love, grief, memory and hope.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca