Journey: The Art of Gaylen Stewart & David Brady brings together two deeply personal bodies of work shaped by experiences with cancer.
For Gaylen Stewart, a cancer diagnosis in his thirties became part of a much longer artistic exploration of life, the body, and the medical world. After a lump was initially misdiagnosed and went unrecognized for nearly a year, Stewart eventually learned that the cancer had spread into his bloodstream, leading to the removal of 46 lymph nodes. His work emerges from a practice already rooted in questions of life, medicine, vulnerability, and what it means to inhabit a body that can suddenly become unfamiliar.
David Brady, now five years cancer free, turned to drawing as a way to document and process his own cancer journey. His sketches became both personal record and connection point, capturing not only his own experience but also the people surrounding it, including fellow patients, medical professionals, friends, family, and the larger community of voices attempting to offer help and support. His work reflects on the noise that often surrounds illness, the complicated ways people show up for one another, and the unexpected relationships formed along the way. These drawings later became part of a book chronicling that journey.
Together, Stewart and Brady offer two distinct perspectives on illness, survival, community, and the act of making meaning through art. Journey does not attempt to simplify the cancer experience into a single story of struggle or triumph. Instead, it invites visitors into the complexity of moving through fear, care, uncertainty, connection, and change, revealing how creative practice can become a way of witnessing what happens to us and finding language for what is often difficult to say.
Journey will be on view August 7 through September 20, with an opening reception on August 7 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm at The Monastery.
