Healing Hearts through Art: Jiwon You, VL Parker, and Q
We are a collective of 3 culturally diverse artists, including First Nations, immigrant, and queer members, each bringing years of unique and varied forms and styles of art practices. Our work is interdisciplinary, involving visual arts, audio, poetry, spiritual art, animation, and digital art. Despite differences in our styles and methods, a common thread that ties our collective together is the theme of healing that centers our practices.
As individuals who have walked the healing journey ourselves, we know how much impact pain and trauma can have on one’s mental, physical, and spiritual health. Because we know such pain, we also know how important and valuable it is to face it directly and process it; art has been our way to process and heal from such wounds, and through our practices, we want to encompass this in our practice.
Our aim is to both convey to others our journey and experiences of healing, but also to provide the opportunity for the audiences to feel seen and understood by our art, leading to even small moments of healing. Through various mediums and methods, we try to capture different forms and moments of healing. Some of our practice portrays healing as mundane, but beautiful, small moments of joy that are around us in our day-to-day, captured by oil paintings of everyday scenes. Some of our art is spirit-led, and it conveys not just individual experience of healing, but collective and ancestral wisdom and strengths. Some parts of our practice involve multimedia installation and use an interplay of different mediums (animation, digital art, traditional art, etc.) to show the dynamic and individualized aspects of healing. Our practice is both collaborative and individual, each constantly inspiring the other to grow as artists and as a team.
Jiwon You
My name is Jiwon, and I am a Korean-Canadian therapist and artist residing in Calgary. I always thought psychotherapy and art shared something important: the ability to capture fleeting emotions that we often miss in our day-to-day lives, and to help us experience them mindfully. Pausing and noticing such moments of calm and joy can extend the half-life of such feelings, helping us heal and approach life as active participants. Thus, I like to use both art and therapy as a medium for healing.
I have a minor in art & design from the University of Alberta, but mostly self-taught. Though I have gone through many interests and topics in my art practice, I primarily like to paint the mundane moments and spaces in life to capture the sense of calmness, serenity, and contentment in them. I like to create medium to large-sized paintings, as they allow me to feel as if I am physically a part of the space portrayed in the painting, heightening the sensation of the feelings the pieces are trying to convey. My primary medium of choice is oil paint, for its slow-drying nature and forgiveness when a mistake has been made. My practice allows me to savour such feelings in the time and space that would normally be out of my awareness, and act as a reminder that my life is filled with such ordinary, but wonderful, moments if I allow myself to notice them.
VL Parker
VL Parker is a Spirit Led Artist, Poet, and Author, who engages in expressive arts as a spiritual practice. Albert Einstein said, “Art is standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world and letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy.” Spirt-led creatives engage in art and explore being that conduit of passing energy. Parker loves to tap into the subconscious divine and play with layers of symbolism when engaging in anything creative. Her creative works often reflect the light overcoming darkness with a focus toward hope, healing and connection to the Divine and the world Spirit world around us.
VL is excited to collaborate with the “Healing Hearts Through Art Collective’. While in residency at Sparrow Artspace, VL will be reflecting on her First Nation’s heritage by creating a series of works to honor her ancestors in an exhibit called, Healing Hearts Through Art: Journey of the Generations. She encourages others through workshops to engage in the Spiritually Expressive Arts to find healing of the mind, body, soul and spirit through the subconscious creative mind . She hopes they get to experience connection to themselves, the Creator and the community through art.
From 2022 to 2025 VL has had several exhibits through out Treaty 7 territory including at: Artis Commons + 15 Galleries in the CIF Truth & Reconciliation Building Bridges and ReconciliACTION Exhibit, in Summer 2024. VL exhibited pieces in the Westview Art’s Collective, MackiMakes Art Studio and the Painted Canvas Art Show in Calgary. Parker’s works were also included in a virtual exhibit at Artexpo New York in 2025. In September, 2025 she hopes to see you at Sparrow Artspace in Calgary.
Q Yezeriux
"Q" is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans from digital to traditional mediums. Paintings, sculptures and digital animation and illustrations are tools that "Q" uses to tell stories with themes of identity, survival, transformation and emotions that almost feel to quiet or loud to be told. The works and stories are layered with intersectionalities of queerness, disability, resilience, cultural narratives and diasphoric experiences using art as a tool. These stories and works span from commissions, exhibitions, personal projects and collaborative community projects. From murals and paintings celebrating queer joy and trans visibility to delicate sculptures that repurpose found items. Paintings and illustrations that bring topics of isolation, healing and pain to that of healing and letting go.
"Q's" art invites into moments of quiet resonance and deep introspection. Notable projects include gallery exhibitions like U-turn Forward and animated pieces such as Falling Away, each exploring personal and collective healing through rich visual metaphors and subtle symbolic explorations. With the collaboration in, "Healing Hearts Through Art", "Q" continues their practice of story telling through a mixture of painting and sculpting. Within sacred moments and hidden journeys, each piece that's created seek to evoke space for connection and reflection.